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More on Columbia
RodeoBoy writes "It seems that regardless of what NASA and Boeing wants the public to believe there are still questions about damage to the shuttle's left wing. Some Boeing engineers have raised concerns that proper analysis of the damage was not done at the time, due to changes and cutbacks in Boeing. It is also coming out that more than one chunk of foam might have hit and damaged the wing. With Boeing having some financial troubles and NASA under public scrutiny again, what is the future of the space shuttle program..."
yeah stop the space program, that'd be cool guys... :-P
It seems strange to me that the left wing has not been located. No news story as of yet has highlighted any confirmed finding of the left wing. How can anyone make a determination without finding it?
Find problem, examine problem, fix problem, learn from problem, push forward. Sure worked (and still does) for trains, planes, and automobiles...
SecondPageMedia - Wha
I haven't been following this closely, but why would NASA want the public to believe in a non-foam-related cause, rather than a foam-related one?
I'd share your cynicism if they were saying, "It wasn't foam, it was Saddam!" But given a failure, why would the foam collision be worth burying in favor of something else?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
You know, it's quite easy to call the race after it's over. However, there are a whole lotta parts on a space shuttle that could lead to potential disaster, and all in all, I think reasonable precautions are being taken. Yes, you can't put a price on human lives, however, there's an associated risk with driving, flying, and launching into outer space, and I think reasonable precautions have been met. I find none of what happened to be neglegent or careless. That's just my $0.02 for what it's worth.
A column on the weaknesses of the shuttle program
Comments welcome.
what would the astronauts want? would they want you to stop exploring space because of them? they knew the risks of exploration, and took them. and let's face it, with NASA down, down comes the ISS, which signifies the unity of the human race dedicated to one cause. don't dishonor the memory of all astronauts by going under.
Does anyone know how dense this foam is? I haven't found any mention of it. Is it like styrofoam density or is it much heaver than that?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I think that we'll get to the bottom of this eventually. Given enough time, of course.
However, I must wonder about how much of the shuttle funds were diverted to help fund the ISS...
In any event, the loss of Columbia and its crew should not be a terminating point for manned space exploration; we all have to escape from Earth in the end!
Is here: http://www.io.com/~o_m/home.html
Excellent work by this guy. No irrational conspiracy theories, no useless speculation, no NASA asskissing.
Sorry if it's a dupe.
Shit happens. That's reality. Things are going to go wrong. Once that thing left the pad, (and at that point everything seamed as right as could be) there is nothing any engineering analysis could do. Even If they had worked 24/7 for the flight with every engineer at boeing and NASA working the issue and they had found there would be a problem there is nothing they could have done. The could have thought about it for the flight or have thought about it for 5 minutes and went to lunch, it would have had the same results. Everything will fail in time. And complexity accelerates this. NASA has list of plenty of single failures that will doom the shuttle.
Far as engineers saying something during the flight in emails. Well I could send out lots of emails saying it will blow up every time it goes up. Some day I would be right, but that wouldn't mean I warned them. If an engineer thought differant about the sitution it doesn't mean NASA ignored them and some is at fault. There were others who didn't agree with him. NASA has to make a call, and the might make the wrong one. This wasnt' preventable far as we know. Maybe it will come back to being some pre-flight thing that was done wrong of neglected, then it's differant, but if it's something that went wrong after launch it very well may be no ones fault. Things like challenger were differant. There engineers told officals before launch about the O-rings. Bulk of the engineers knew there was an extremely high chance it would fail on that day. When it blew they didn't even have to ask why it failed, they knew. They just had to investigate to show they were right. That was a preventable accident that was the fault of not listening to engineers.
I predict they won't build another one.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
who put that foam there. We must start the compaign to ban all foam from the United States of America. Think of the children! When, I ask you, when will the maddness end? How did it happen that we, as a country, did not see this one coming? All the products that could be potentially dangerous and/or used in a terrorist attack. First the trench coats, then the box cutters, the nail filers, the pointy umbrelas, the McDonald, and now the foam! We must open our eyes as a society. We must protect the children at all cost! The land of the Free and the home of the Brave must be cleared of all the dangerous items so that our children could go outside again. (wait, what am I saying?) Ban the outside! For the childrens' sake! It's dangerous out there, lets ban the outside!
You can't handle the truth.
The best outcome of the Columbia tragedy would be for NASA to get entirely out of the suborbital and orbital business altogether. As a pure launch vehichle, the Space Shuttle was not all that efficient, especially when considering the turnaround time involved. Handing over (what should be) relatively simple tasks to the private sector, would save millions of dollars of pork and mismanagement, thereby freeing said missions from a needless government bureaucracy and private sector 'contractors-for-life'. For it to remain viable, NASA needs to focus on extra-terran missions, both robotic and manned, if it wishes to remain a worthy vassal of the United States taxpayer.
For that matter, even lunar missions would be a better use of money than testing the effects of near zero gravity on ants.
You're only as smart as your brain.
The americans don't have another manned spaceship or rocket in service at the moment. A successor of the shuttle will take many years to design, test and build. So they will improve the safety of the shuttle and go on with it. Until a third accident proves the unsafety of the shuttle.
Is off limits.
Joking about the incompetence of the program that caused the disaster is open season.
Or is it?
tcd004
The most important story of the past few days is the role of falling ice, not just "foam", from the central booster.
All of which were invented and developed in the public sector.
NASA is a monopolistic government agency which self evaluates, self polices and has little in the way of market pressures to deal with in order to continue to exist.
It makes a difference.
KFG
Really though. I thought that space exploration was a pretty risky endeavour. NASA tries to be as careful as possible, but they have a limited budget and finite resources. Given the staggering risks involved, I'd say that they are still doing pretty well. This latest explosion will cause a new wave of safety checking which is all good stuff. How many of you wouldn't give you left nut to be on that next shuttle anyways. Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!
No guts, no glory...
Clickety Click
people to know about the O-rings. The modern/post Apollo NASA has always been deathly allergic to admiting they just plain fucked up or cut corners.
m l
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77832,00.ht
KFG
What probably will happen is that our government will waste a lot more of our tax money and make a bunch of stupid decisions that nobody really cares about.
What I say is we should do the following
1. Sell the space shuttles to someone else, China?
2. Make NASA a regulator agency, like the FCC of FDA.
3. Privatize the space industry.
This will result in money being spent to do useful things with space travel. People will be able to put up sattelites, space tourism will begin and eventually flourish. Someone might set up a hotel type space station. Or a moon base, or go to mars. All in all it should boost the economy by creating a new industry for people to work in and new companies to work for, as well as making life a hell of a lot more interesting.
Of course there are reasons not to do this, but this is what I want, not necessarily the best idea in the world, or the most realistic one.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
My dad works for Boeing and does lots of stuff with sattelites and space, though admittedly not rockets specifically. He can't imagine how insulation could've caused the damage in question. The insulation is extremely light and low density; it would've had to have been going rediculiously fast to have the force to cause damage to the tiles, and launching speeds aren't that fast until you're a few miles up. Ice is a more likely contender than insulation, since it's very hard etc, but it's rare to have a piece fall off that is massive enough to have much kinetic energy, and most of the ice is kicked off before the rocket gets going very fast.
I find it pretty insulting when people try to imply that NASA and Boeing are being anything but absolutely forthcoming about information. Sure, it's in their best interest to displace blame, but this isn't the X-Files here. If NASA knows something, they're going to tell the public.
It's not what "NASA or Boeing wants us to believe" that is important. It's what an investigation can determine. It'll take time for enough detail to emerge before we know.
This kind of "us vs them" story indicates all that is wrong with the coverage. It will be methodical analysis, and maybe some luck, that will eventually tell the story. And we might as well get used to the fact that we may NEVER know exactly what happened - only what is probable. That's the real world.
Here's a commentary on preparations for a shuttle launch I saw in Jan.1998:
For December 20, 1997
Shuttle launch slips again
By Jim Banke
FLORIDA TODAY
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -- Shuttle Endeavour is securely bolted to its seaside launch pad today but it won't be taking off to the Russian space station Mir quite as soon as NASA officials had planned.
Efforts in the Vehicle Assembly Building this week to sand away some of the protective insulation covering Endeavour's orange external tank took longer than hoped for, prompting NASA to delay the first shuttle launch of 1998 two days to Jan. 22.
The decision came Friday afternoon, shortly after Endeavour completed its 3.5-mile move from the assembly building to launch pad 39A, said Kennedy Space Center spokesman Joel Wells.
This was the second delay for Endeavour in as many weeks. Originally targeted for launch Jan. 15, the flight was bumped five days to honor a request from Russian Space Agency officials who said they needed more time to prepare for the shuttle's arrival at Mir.
In the meantime, managers looking into why Columbia returned to Earth Dec. 5 with more damage to its heat protection tiles than normal decided to have some of the foam insulation on Endeavour's tank removed as a precaution.
The work had to be completed while the shuttle was still inside the assembly building because workers would not be able to reach the suspect areas once Endeavour was at the pad, Wells said.
Normally a shuttle spends about five days in the assembly building while it is attached to the external tank and pair of solid rocket boosters. This time Endeavour spent nearly a week so a slip in the schedule became necessary, Wells said.
Endeavour's mission will mark the first time that particular spaceship has docked with Mir. The shuttle is to ferry NASA astronaut Andy Thomas up for a tour of duty on Mir and return David Wolf, who is aboard Mir now.
Meanwhile, activity aboard Mir will be busy this weekend as Wolf and his two Russian crewmates anticipate the arrival Monday of a new Progress cargo ship. The unmanned robot ship was scheduled to blast off from Kazakstan at 3:45 a.m. EST today.
The most recent Progress spaceship to bring supplies to the Mir crew was sent - empty of its cargo but full of garbage - tumbling to burn up in Earth's atmosphere early Friday.
NOTE: Launch Jan 22, 1998
Is it possible for the public sector to take on something like NASA though? Could the money be gathered? I can see where you are coming from, that the program would be better if it wasn't 100% government controlled and operated, but could such a huge, broad-based organization such as the present day NASA be assembled to successfully maintain a shuttle program?
SecondPageMedia - Wha
The Columbia disaster is still a mystery to me. What is foam? It's soft, like a pillow, or the packing insulation in your electronics shipment. The relative speed of the aircraft to the foam projectile would have to be more than hundreds of miles per hour to do any damage.
Think of throwing a baseball. A good baseball pitcher will throw at 70, 80, 90 miles per hour. Now throw a piece of foam at that speed. You could hit my head with it, and no damage would be done!
I suggest you read Slashdot
OK, we can't retire the space shuttle today. Nor tomorrow. But its time is drawing near...
Consider first that the shuttle was a massive compromise versus the original proposed designs. If the budget had been infinite, we would have had a better shuttle. If the budgeteers had had more foresight, we might (probably) have had a better shuttle. The shuttle we have now is a big series of compromises that limit its usefulness and safety.
Now consider that the shuttle program has been around since 1981. That's more than half of the time that's passwd since man first walked on the moon! It still seems shiny to some of us (myself included), because it was the only newsmaking bit of space exploration in our youth. However, it's old. It's an old (and limited) design, and we have learned a lot of what to do (or not) on the next go around. It's time to climb the next step of astronautical evolution.
So let's keep them in top shape, fly them as necessary (mostly as ferries to the ISS), while putting as much money as possible into a next-generation space vehicle.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
but this was a friggin car accident. Seven people died. The car happened to be very very very very very very very expensive.
Like this guy said. All this speculation is ridiculous. Let them do what they do.
Flame on.
3cx.org - A truly bad website.
Seems you've (perhaps unknowingly) drawn a good parallel with the open source vs. closed source argument.
Today for example had interviews with some engineers at USA regarding the Cult of Safety, and a bunch of other things.
They've got a whole ongoing section dedicated to the investigation and how its going.
-
a rocket a day keeps the shuttles away: a rocket a day
-- SKYKING, SKYKING, DO NOT ANSWER.
...we throw money at Nasa to maintain our dominance in space, and we'll continue to throw money at them. The only "future" in question here is of the person who's going to end up the scapegoat for Columbia going down. Whoever that ends up being, I feel sorry for the embarrassment they're going to have to endure for the next couple of years while the public is busy being shocked over the assundry revelations that will certainly be revealed about the destructive nature of foam debris, right up until they're forgotten and get an early retirement with full benefits and move on to spending the rest of their days in some mountain town in Wyoming where the few people who even know who they are, are just glad to have a celebrity in town.
More people died from hunger while I wrote this than died trying to get back to earth after a visit to space, something virtually none of us will get to experience. Yeah, I feel sorry for the poor Columbia crew.
It's simple math and economics. Financially the shuttle program has been a terrible disaster. Now you can't second guess anything and there have been advances in comfort and living conditions in space and such thanks to the shuttle but I'm sure the same kind of things would have been done without it. We've learned things because of the shuttle, it hasn't stopped science, it's just not delivered what it was supposed to have.
I also fear that NASA itself may be out of date and obsolete. Am I the only one who is disgusted by the notion of the beaurocracy? There are all of these emails surfacing. I've worked at IBM and other big places and I get this sick feeling of CYA going on. I can just see the Dilbert-esque rocket scientist sitting at his desk composing the emails to the director about the foam falling off and the other possible causes. "Properly documenting" the risk. I've read Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster and that's one of the issues he pointed out. The administration lives in make believe where the engineers make compromises to do things on time. It's kind of a bummer because there are people that die because of it. I'd like to think that someone will be held accountable, I doubt that anybody other than an administrative warm body will be and at best they'll be fired and get a really high paying job at Boeing, TRW, or Raytheon.
I think it's high time we start looking at splitting NASA up in to 2 or 3 groups and making them compete with each other. Let the beaurocracy die and the science come back, make them write proposals, beg congress and private parties for funding and then hold them accountable for delivery. Let different groups take different approaches. Reward success with continued funding. NASA is cheap, relatively speaking. We can easily fund 3 NASAs. Right now it all rides on the success and failure of one entity with nearly an impossible mission, logisitally speaking. NASA can't even admit that the shuttle program is a failure because then they lose face and funding and there isn't another organization in place to do the science. So science continues to limp and NASA continues to put bandaids on a very expensive wound that has taken more lives than all other space related accidents put together.
And for the record I am appriciative and recognize the hard work and accomplishments of everyone associated with the shuttle program. They have engineered some amazing things and I'm not attacking anybody personally. It's the program as a whole that hasn't delivered what it promised.
Now, I believe with other countries beginning to make more forays into space, the American shuttle program will be looked at as an innovative first step towards reaching the goal of cheap space flight. I don't think it will be seen as a failure. The fact that we have a fleet of vehicles which can be sent into space time and time again is quite extraordinary in and of itself. The rest of the world looks at our program as something which has paved the way for what they are doing. It is because we have already forged ahead that many countries are following.
Ultimately, it is worth the money to keep investing in NASA. The money needs to be monitored and we need to ensure that new goals of safer and better space flight are being met.
To me, you sound like Chicken Little. One explosion does not an administration destroy young grasshopper.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
All of which were invented and developed in the public sector.
And by the millitary.
Note that I didn't make any particular value judgment, per se. I was simply stating facts that make it difficult or impossible for NASA to operate under what would be called "normal" circumstances. They are not truly a scientific or engineering firm. They are a political agency with all the faults thereof, which just happens to be in charge of building things that go "Whooosh" into the sky.
Certainly up to this point what they have accomplished would have been simply impossible otherwise. It would be like asking some ancient Egyptians to get together and build a pyramid in their back yard.
However, even a cursory examination of the history of the whole shuttle project will reveal it to be a purely political affair.
Apollo and its forbears may have had politics as their genesis, but then, at least for a time, the politics dictated that the politicians get the hell out of the way and let the engineers get the job done.
That time has long since passed, whether public perception has caught up with the times or not.
KFG
I was thinking to myself what NASA should do to increase mankind's presence in orbit and how to go about it. It is apparent to just about everyone that the current Space Transportation System (STS) is in need of replacement. The last time we tried to do that was under the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) under the Clinton administration. That program was a failure, not because of Clintons people, but because there were technological and monetary hurdles that couldn't be properly addressed. However there is a way to do this. Right now the STS fleet is grounded, so the immediate concern is how to keep the ISS in orbit and fully manned. Russian President Putin has promised to build more Soyuz space craft to insure ISS is manned and supplied. From what I've found, it cost Russian anywhere from 25 to 50 million bucks to launch a manned Soyuz and a little less for a Progress supply ship. I would propose that the US discontinue any crew transport missions for the Shuttle to ISS and pay a significant portion of the money needed to keep Soyuz ships flying to ISS instead. If these ships cost 50 million bucks then there is a savings of about 400 million bucks for each transport (the Shuttle cost an estimated 450 million to fly). When the Shuttle is back on in the air, it should ONLY fly construction missions to finish the ISS. The the STS should be retired. That begs the question, what do we do with 450 mil for each flight that doesn't go? Since there are typically 6 or 7 flights by the Shuttle per year, about half of them are for significant construction of ISS. So we are looking at a savings of nearly 1.5 billion per fiscal year. THAT money should be invested in a completely new Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) space shuttle like the X-33 was meant to be. But that's not all. In order for space travel to become affordable, space vehicles must become more affordable. Building 5 space shuttles cost the taxpayers between 3 and 5 billion for each one (the Endeavor cost 3 billion because it was built from spare parts). If we could build say 20 or 30 space shuttles, the cost could possibly be cut in half or perhaps more. NASA doesn't need 20 or 30 shuttles, however, if we could get the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russians, the Japanese, Aussies, and even the Koreans to join up with the promise of owning their own shuttles, the cost could be easily be spread out. You see, the Europeans would get out from under NASA's shadow which they have for so long hated. They wanted to build a ship back in the 80's called the Sanger but they didn't have the money for it. The Europeans don't have the experience of space travel that we or the Russians do but they do have a lot of technology and engineering that they can bring to the table. The Russians are obvious additions because of their experience. What they can't bring to the table in money, they can definitly bring in know how. The Japanese have always wanted a manned space program but they too don't have the money to foot the bill for all the R&D involved. In addition, their rocket program has suffered many setbacks. The Koreans might look on this as national pride IMO and a chance to play with the big boys. We of course know more about Shuttles than anyone and of course can bring more money to the table. America would still have it's leadership role in the project but would still have to work with members of the development and building team. You see, I no longer see space exploration as an American dream. This is a HUMAN endeavor. We as Americans (or Russians) just happen to be better at it than anyone else. If we build a shuttle or two that can haul cargo and personnel to low Earth orbit in a cost effective manner, we will see more and more people going and that is the goal. Get more up there so we can do more. NASA has already learned that it needs to get out of the space launching business and get into the Space Exploration and Space Science business. NASA was essentially going to sell the Shuttles to the United Space Alliance and lease them back. The USA was going to maintain the Shuttles and NASA or Air Force pilots were going to fly them. NASA needs to get away from the space monopoly that it has created so that competition can be built. The same thing happened when NASA got out of the satelite launching business after the Challenger disaster. Getting people to compete and getting a new reliable shuttle with the world behind it will establish a firm foothold in space for the human race. Right now we have had our foot in the door for too long and earlier this month it got jammed. Now it's time to kick open the door and step inside. Once we have a firm foundation in orbit and on the moon, then we can procede to the Planets and the stars.
There is nothing inherently safe about liberty. That's why so many people died protecting it.
...because there's very little financial advantage to space exploration and science. It's mainly a military endeavor with the side-benefit of being able to place satellites in orbit (which is financially useful). But there's nothing else to make money off of. Nothing. If it wasn't for a governmental mandate, and if the resources weren't pooled into Nasa, there would be no space program in the U.S. We'd have the Ariana system, small rockets that do jack squat but place satellites. That's it. In fact, Nasa only is what it is right now because of the race to the moon. There is no competition in that. One company was asked to do it, funded and they went. If you busted up Nasa now, there would be nothing for them to compete for. They'd all be busy eating investor money until one of them decided to compete with Ariana and then they'd buy the other failing companies for whatever puny amount of technology they developed and they'd call the conglomerate "Nasa," and then start soliciting government contracts to develop space programs to keep our military dominance in space above the rest of the world.
Did I mention they'd call it "Nasa?"
For the most part this is not true. The military has poured vasts amount of *money* into certain areas (notably airplanes, their involvment in the others is actually miniscule).
Development, however, has almost all been by the private sector to compete for contracts. In other words, they develop a product and then try to sell it.
Fokker, Sopwith, Boeing, General Dynamics, SAAB, all private firms that develop most of their products, even the military ones, quite independently.
KFG
Obviously you have no idea what you're talking about. NASA is accountable to Congress and the Whitehouse. OMB micromanages NASA to the point of irrelevency. Every good project that NASA was ever involved in during the past 20 years has been fucked up by budget cuts and Congressional budget cuts. They kill whatever doesn't benefit their states. Period. ISS is a multibillion dollar boondoggle to benefit the residents of Texas, and Alabama.
independent business man trying to fund various space programs and talking about NASA's bloat and the reason why we don't haev all that much shit in space, nasa quotes a $20,000/lb price to get things in orbit (low earth i think specifically) this guy was taling about being able to cut it down to liek $1500...
shit like this i why we don't have bases on mars already.. so much for bushes (yes that's plural both made promises) mars goals.. they need to privatize space exploration while allowing for the safety checks that keep us all from dying of radiation poisoning when someone tries to launch nuclear waste at the sun and fucks up..
Aviation Week and Space Technology (which doesn't have a free web site, alas) reports this week that Columbia has had a problem in a few of its flights with a premature transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The Shuttle reentry profile nominally has the airflow under the wing transitioning to turbulent flow around Mach 9, but on a recent Columbia flight it happened much sooner, around Mach 19.
Turbulent flow mixes the air near the surface much more, causing far greater transfer of heat to the Shuttle. There was some 'slumping' of tiles in that previous flight, temperatures reached ~2000 degrees, right at the limit of what the tiles can take.
This happens because Columbia's wing was far less smooth than the other (remaining) orbiters.
If there was significant roughness added by the foam/ice/whatever gouging the wing, that would increase the heating even more.
Another problem they were concerned with was an asymmetric transition to turbulent flow, which would cause the drag on one wing to be higher than the other, yawing the shuttle -- but it seems that there is more than enough control authority in the elevons and RCS system to counteract that if it happens.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
Even if the foam hitting the wing at launch was the cause of the reentry failure, there's nothing they could have done about it, even if they had positively known that was going to cause a catastrophic failure upon reentry.
A similar event occured during Apollo XII, the second manned Moon landing. During launch, the Saturn V rocket was struck by lightning, causing a number of failures which were rapidly corrected. After they were out of the atmosphere, back at Mission Control, they pondered whether or not the lightning strike might have damaged the pyrotechnics that cause the parachute to deploy after reentry (they could hit the "chute deploy" button, but nothing would happen -- the pyros would already be burned out). Just as in the case of the Columbia, to know this information they'd need to have done an unscheduled EVA, and the additional information would have really changed nothing: If they did an about-face and reentered right then, they'd have been just as dead reentering then as they would after a successful Moon landing. So there was really no point even knowing; the knowledge would have changed nothing about the reality of the situation. (Of course, in the case of Apollo XII, the pyros were undamaged and the chutes deployed without incident.)
The point is, even if they positively knew that it was a problem, knowing and then reentering and dying isn't any different from not knowing and then reentering and dying.
I think some NASA contractors are hoping that they can lay the blame on space debris or even another contractor rather then take the blame themselves.
Shuttle is and allways was a dangerous overrated toy. It is robbing the public of money that could be better used and taking the lives of men and women that could be doing more useful work then silly tests in space and housesitting a useless spacestation.
If we aren't going to colonize space, the moon, or mars then keep people out of it. Or let those who want to go there PAY for it themselves.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Obvioulsy I do. If you go back and read my post again, a bit more carefully this time, you'll find that you just largely agreed with me.
Yes, I am a physicist, who consults, and has worked with people who work on the shuttle. I've avoided the ISS because it's what we in the trade refer to, technically, as "doofey."
So's the shuttle for that matter, but what are ya gonna do?
KFG
We're just one step away from conspiracy theory time here, folks, and I don't like it. I posted at the start of this whole thing several weeks ago that I thought the foam theory was a red herring, several of you argued with me and the next day NASA all but ruled it out. I suppose it's human nature - the foam theory is the simplest explanation (even if it doesn't make logical sense) and it's one that we can visually see with our own layman eyes (we've all seen the video of the foam hitting the wing).
The problem is the truth is almost never that simple when it comes to accidents involving complex and highly redundant systems. NASA is obviously having a hard time believing a 2 foot, 2 pound piece of foam could bring down such a technologically advanced piece of engineering (and yes, it was technologically advanced - much of Columbia's heat shielding, including the leading edges of the wings, was replaced with state of the art materials in 1999). I am having a hard time believing it too.
Anyone who has ever read a major aircraft disaster report from the NTSB knows that it is almost always a series of highly implausible events that conspire to cause disaster. Any one of these events would be remote; the chances of them coming together in the way they did would be almost impossible (but not completely impossible). This is the way it almost always is. We know that several shuttles - including Columbia - have been hit in their wings by launch debris in the past and suffered no ill effects. Why do we all suddenly want to believe that same debris brought the shuttle down this time? I don't believe it.
I do believe it could be part of the answer, though not the full answer. I believe it's possible (and I'm sure NASA's looking into this, among other things) that the foam hit was the first in a series of problems that compounded upon each other to eventually cause disaster. If it hit in exactly the correct (or incorrect) spot, where a fault already existed, then that's a different story. I know NASA's looking at the procedures used in the Columbia's last overhaul, for example (it's flown only once since then). In that case, the foam hit wouldn't be the cause of the accident - the faulty overhaul of the heat shielding would be. But NASA's looking at a lot of things, and I'm just speculating here, like all the rest of us.
The point is, NASA is an organization of scientists. They wouldn't know how to spin if they tried. They're looking at things analytically and none of their computer models are telling them that the foam by itself could bring the shuttle down. Who are you to argue with them? You'd think on this site, of all places, people would understand that scientists don't go rushing and jumping to conclusions - they examine all the possibilities and analyze everything very methodically. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't "want us to believe". I'm sure if they weren't so focused on their job at hand right now they'd be laughing at what so many of us apparently want to believe, whether or not there's actually any evidence to support our "theory".
That's the best guess for the speed and mass of the foam that hit Columbia, based on the size of the chunk and Columbia's acceleration at the time.
I bet your head would hurt if *that* hit it...;-)
Of course, now it turns out there may have been *three* foam strikes, not just one. And it may have been more than foam: add a bit of ice in there, and the weight goes up dramatically. That's not an unlikely hypothesis, since the foam is there to prevent ice condensate from hitting the orbiter on launch.
Whether foam caused the catastrophe or something else did, no power on earth was able to save these astronauts once they left the ground. They could not have dropped by the space station and waited for rescue, no docking bay was attached to the shuttle. I cannot see how obfuscation of the facts will help NASA, they want to know what happened so that it doesnt happen again. By downplaying the significance of the foam, which seems the obvious cause to us armchair space directors, they are allowing for all options to be given equal weight in the search for the truth.
Do you need a website upgrade?
..and he said that somebody probably forgot to tighten a few bolts on Columbia; after all, it was exempt from a lot of maintenance because it was old (how's that for logic?).
http://www.msnbc.com/news/876167.asp?0cv=CB10
more in http://www.ralentz.com/old/space/feynman-report.ht ml
on a lighter note (not really light)
in http://www.terindell.com/asylum/filk/other/burton- west/nature.txt
you'll find a song
-- Avishalom is usually vish
We had a confirmed strike on the orbiter's left wing by debris from the main tank.
Best guesses for the point of impact were around the left wheel well.
The orbiter then experiences a thermal breakup, apparently originating around the left wheel well.
We have Boeing engineers in California saying that the folks at Boeing Houston were inexperienced at doing the risk analysis (this was their first 'live' outing since they moved the office out to Houston), and *ignored* the results of the CRATER impact simulator because it predictated Orbiter destruction. This is the program the Boeing California engineers (who have all the experience doing strike analyses) wrote.
Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explaination is the most likely. Something hit the wing, the tiles were damaged, the orbiter was destroyed. The only thing remaining is whether or not the damage was detectable *before* re-entry. And it's looking like it was, based on e-mails that have been released and interviews given by California Boeing engineers. Everything else is a Cover Your Ass Squaredance between NASA and Boeing, neither of which will admit that the orbiter was lost because of budgetry cutbacks and bad management.
The same ceramic tiles which, at least on Challenger and Columbia (the first two shuttles built), took years to install because they kept breaking my the force of being pressed by a human finger onto the hull.
The original tiles were very delicate and obscenely hard to attach. New glues were developed, but it still took a long time because they kept breaking. It wouldn't take much to damage it, especially since Columbia was the first operational shuttle of 20 years service, with all the first-generation problems that implies!
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Soon after the accident, some people were correcting news casters that this would was not accident, but, like the Challenger, a failure of process. The media has been harking on certain reports that long ago reported the danger of certain tile damage. There are likely many reports on many of the shuttle systems that vulnerable under certain circumstances. Unlike many place, NASA does not hide it's head in the sand. It actively looks for problems and tries to solve them, if necessary. If the process works this makes the space travel safer. When the process does not work, as in Challenger, people die.
I have no doubt that whatever the cause of the accident, some report exists somewhere detailing the scenario. That does not necessarily mean NASA was negligent, just that NASA is thorough. Space travel is dangerous and as much as they might try, the process cannot be made so perfect as to catch and solve every problem. As many people have already said, you solve identify the problem, figure out the best way to solve it, and move on.
I would like to add one personal note. In my experience NASA is very focused on identifying problems, solving problems, and moving on. The step they don't do, and the step that many firms would do well to leave out the process, is the scape goating. It is as waste of time. In some companies in which I have work, fully half the time is spent figuring out how to blame other people for your fuck ups, and then participating in the ensuing punishment. It is inefficient and does nothing to create better products.
And one more thing. Under the the rules of the Clinton administration, all government agencies were required to do al they could to release documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Under the Bush administration, John Ashcroft has request the agencies do all they can NOT to release document requested under the FOIA. The implication of this is that the rapid release of document requested from NASA under the FOIA is totally voluntary. If they wanted to hide thing, Ashcroft has given them permission to do so.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I was thinking to myself what NASA should do to increase mankind's presence in orbit and how to go about it. It is apparent to just about everyone that the current Space Transportation System (STS) is in need of replacement. The last time we tried to do that was under the Space Launch Initiative (SLI) under the Clinton administration. That program was a failure, not because of Clintons people, but because there were technological and monetary hurdles that couldn't be properly addressed.
However there is a way to do this. Right now the STS fleet is grounded, so the immediate concern is how to keep the ISS in orbit and fully manned. Russian President Putin has promised to build more Soyuz space craft to insure ISS is manned and supplied. From what I've found, it cost Russian anywhere from 25 to 50 million bucks to launch a manned Soyuz and a little less for a Progress supply ship.
I would propose that the US discontinue any crew transport missions for the Shuttle to ISS and pay a significant portion of the money needed to keep Soyuz ships flying to ISS instead. If these ships cost 50 million bucks then there is a savings of about 400 million bucks for each transport (the Shuttle cost an estimated 450 million to fly). When the Shuttle is back on in the air, it should ONLY fly construction missions to finish the ISS. The the STS should be retired.
That begs the question, what do we do with 450 mil for each flight that doesn't go? Since there are typically 6 or 7 flights by the Shuttle per year, about half of them are for significant construction of ISS. So we are looking at a savings of nearly 1.5 billion per fiscal year. THAT money should be invested in a completely new Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) space shuttle like the X-33 was meant to be. But that's not all. In order for space travel to become affordable, space vehicles must become more affordable.
Building 5 space shuttles cost the taxpayers between 3 and 5 billion for each one (the Endeavor cost 3 billion because it was built from spare parts). If we could build say 20 or 30 space shuttles, the cost could possibly be cut in half or perhaps more. NASA doesn't need 20 or 30 shuttles, however, if we could get the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russians, the Japanese, Aussies, and even the Koreans to join up with the promise of owning their own shuttles, the cost could be easily be spread out.
You see, the Europeans would get out from under NASA's shadow which they have for so long hated. They wanted to build a ship back in the 80's called the Sanger but they didn't have the money for it. The Europeans don't have the experience of space travel that we or the Russians do but they do have a lot of technology and engineering that they can bring to the table. The Russians are obvious additions because of their experience. What they can't bring to the table in money, they can definitly bring in know how.
The Japanese have always wanted a manned space program but they too don't have the money to foot the bill for all the R&D involved. In addition, their rocket program has suffered many setbacks. The Koreans might look on this as national pride IMO and a chance to play with the big boys. We of course know more about Shuttles than anyone and of course can bring more money to the table.
America would still have its leadership role in the project but would still have to work with members of the development and building team. You see, I no longer see space exploration as an American dream. This is a HUMAN endeavor. We as Americans (or Russians) just happen to be better at it than anyone else. If we build a shuttle or two that can haul cargo and personnel to low Earth orbit in a cost effective manner, we will see more and more people going and that is the goal. Get more up there so we can do more.
NASA has already learned that it needs to get out of the space launching business and get into the Space Exploration and Space Science business. NASA was essentially going to sell the Shuttles to the United Space Alliance and lease them back. The USA was going to maintain the Shuttles and NASA or Air Force pilots were going to fly them. NASA needs to get away from the space monopoly that it has created so that competition can be built. The same thing happened when NASA got out of the satelite launching business after the Challenger disaster.
Getting people to compete and getting a new reliable shuttle with the world behind it will establish a firm foothold in space for the human race. Right now we have had our foot in the door for too long and earlier this month it got jammed. Now it's time to kick open the door and step inside. Once we have a firm foundation in orbit and on the moon, then we can procede to the Planets and the stars.
(I really don't see why 10+ paragraphs worth of stuff would ever be formatted is one giant blob. That this was modded up was incredible -- I know I can't read a 50 sentence blob!)
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Are you guys ready for the China shuttle manned launch this year..
Who says NASA cannot have real competition..
Don't Tread on OpenSource
Just as the problem with the O-rings was with Morton-Thiokol.
Nonetheless NASA is still essentially in charge, and the root issue is actually the shuttle design itself, which was political.
You'll note also that it took people outsid of NASA to subversively reveal the trouble with the O-rings. NASA itself ( as well as Morton-Thiokol) tried to everything they could to bury the whole thing under "spin." They're going about it now too, if you look carefully.
Contrast this to the development model of Daimler, Mercedes or Curtis in their first 20 years.
How much better are space shuttles today than they were 20 years ago?
KFG
Which Country poses the greatest Threat to World Peace?
Here
So far,
546808 votes,
North Korea 5.8%,
Iraq 6.9%
The United States 87.3%
Have your say!
Plains trains and automobiles were developed largeley in the private sector (ie. commercially).
NASA is a public sector (government) agency.
Terminology problem?
You are correct sir, and I obviously misstyped/brain farted.
I'm afraid it happens with all too frequent regularity.
My post editors shall be flogged and fired.
KFG
"It wasn't foam, it was Saddam!"
:-P
Dead right!
The foam is probably made from petrochemicals,
these were refined from crude oil,
probably originating in the middle east,
maybe even from Iraq!
You don't have to be Donald Rumsfield to put two and two together and blame Iraq for this heinous atrocity!!!!!
Either that or the shuttle was shot down by an Al Quaida operated railgun lent to Osama by Saddam and fired from Cuba! (those railguns have long range you know).
Honest.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
At no point has NASA or any investigator come out and said that it was "'X' that caused the shuttle to break up." If anything, they've been imploring to the press not to jump to any conclusions. The easy answer would be to say, "Gee, it was an ice-engorged chunk of foam that struck the wing and broke the tiles off that caused this terribly accident."
The problem is, the foam is the most obvious candidate for causing the damage. But what if it wasn't? What if it was actually a fuel line that cracked open, began to burn -- hydrazine's value to the space program is that it can burn in a vacuum -- maybe it burned a hole from the inside out, allowing plasma from the rentry to get into the wing. What if it was actually a piece of space debris that struck the shuttle? We almost lost a crew a few years ago when a paint chip almost penetrated through one of the windows.
We just don't know, If they say it was the foam and it was actually something else, then the actual problem will not get fixed, and we will lose more astronauts.
The answers aren't going to come instantly. It is going to take a long time. It can take experts a couple of years to figure out what made an airplane come down, in spite of the fact that usually with a plane crash, the debris is in one small area. The shuttle debris is scattered over several states. The further west a piece is, the more likely it is going to shed light on what happened. The first pieces to come off are the most critical.
The astronauts are well aware that with each launch, they have a 50% to 70% chance of being killed. It's a testiment to how NASA does things that we haven't lost more astronauts. They accept this risk, because the work they do does eventually help everyone else in one way or another. They feel that this is worth the risk, to do what they can to help other people.
Will we stop going to space? Hell no! Even if the government gives up, people won't. How many people have died over the centuries when sailing ships explored the oceans? How many Polynesians sailed away from their home islands to colonize somewhere else, never to see dry land again? We have a pretty good idea how many Spanish galleons were lost in the Carribean. With a crew of upwards of 400, one ship resulted in a lot of lives lost.
None of that stopped us. Losing Challenger didn't stop us. Losing Columbia won't either. But it clearly serves as a terrible wakeup call that we missed something, and a sad reminder that spaceflight is not without risks.
So before you cry 'foul' and 'coverup,' give the people a chance to find out what happened to their friends.
Last -- what if they did know there was a problem? Do you think the crew would have wanted their friends and family knowing? Sitting there for the duration of the mission knowing their loved ones were doomed? I wouldn't want my family going through something like that. I'd rather put on a brave face, do everything I can to finish my work and life in some meaningful fashion, and then face destiny without making them suffer.
Sorry about the sermon...
Whew! This water sure is cold!
Jerry Pournelle's Site has several interesting articles on the space program. He's a science fiction author (see 'Fallen Angeles') at the Baen Free Library who worked in aerospace for many years, has testified before Congress and given speeches to the Air War College.
STS 107 was also the second heaviest Shuttle ever at re entry, with 7 astronauts and the Space Hab, this weight (some say higher than the 233,000 lbs recommended) may have also contributed to it encountering the Asymetric Boundry Layer Transition earlier in the landing than normal, contributing to greater heat.
c urrent. html
Lots of good reading here by stuff complied by Bill Harwood of CBS news:
http://cbsnews.cbs.com/network/news/space/
I think that the most likely cause of this is the better, faster, cheaper paradigm. The articles I have read about the Boeing analysis points to aerospace industry considation moving work from experienced (20+ years) engineers having their jobs moved to Texas. Why the hell would an experienced engineer in Hungington Beach move to Texas, when there is plenty of work were he or she is? So, a small amount moved to Texas, leaving dozens of inexperienced engineers to do the risk analysis of the foam impact. But, in reality, if they found that the tiles were severly damaged, what the hell could they have done? I guess in the past they have found ways to cool sections of the fuselage that may be vunerable, but what if the damage was a very large section? If they know that the "heat shield" was damaged to the point that the shuttle would be lost, what could they do? ISS was way to high in altitude for the shuttle to reach, and the shuttle did not have the ISS docking ring anyway. They had the large experiment module in the payload bay. Further, they have no escape pod. In reality there was no way to save them. So, do you just keep it quiet and let them enjoy the last days of their lives without worry? Why tell them if there is nothing you can do?
I agree that there is something wrong with how the system is set up - however I don't think this would solve much.
Selling the space shuttles to someone else (especially China) wouldn't accomplish much. The USA would be out its only way to get humans into space, and probably wouldn't get that much money out of the deal since they're so old. Hell, China's already building their own program - if they even bought the Shuttles, they almost certainly just use the navigation componets and the heat-sheild technology, if that.
One of the reasons that the FDA and FCC have so much power is that the USA is the primary consumer of the good they regulate. Over here, what the FDA says is law, but in the UK, we can buy non-FDA approved things, and we can't buy some things that the FDA does approve. Same goes with the FCC - in Europe, it's all about following EEC directives and getting the CE stamp on all electronics. The FCC apprival is nice (and most have it so they can be sold overseas without much modicifation), but it's not needed. Spcae dosen't work that way. The NASA regulatory agency would have the power to regulate US space travel, but why should the Chinese (or the ESA, or the Russians) listen to what the NASA regualtors say. And anyways, don't forget we sold the Shuttles to China in step one, so there's not a whole lot to regulate. Sure there's commercial launches, but they're mostly government-assisted anyways. So we have a reglatory body that regulates how Americans get into space, but no one else has to listen to them. In this way Space would be like the high seas - each country gets its litle area (3 mile EEZ/soverign airspace), but once you get high enough up it's fair game to anyone.
The third one's not even worth commenting one. In the cargo sector, it's happening already. In the human transport sector, once we develop a cheap way to send people into space it will be spun off from the government. The Fed will keeps its program for research and defense, but with enough cash you will be able to send anything you want into space.
If you want to regulate space, give it to the UN and have them update the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 or something - but I don't think China ever signed that, did they? But if you want NASA to regulate space, you need to give them the guns to shoot down anyone who dosen't listen - something which both won't and shouldn't happen. Look what hapend to Britain when they tried to be Imperialistic and rule the seas in the 1700s and 1800s - it just dosen't work.
Cue The Sun...
MJC
To ask about the future of the shuttle program is valid, but to preface it in fabricated conspiracy notions is typical of the deluded and unearned cynicism that masquerades as insight around here.
Whether the shuttle has a future or not is not particularly relevant. The real question is: What About Human Space Travel?
The shuttle is just one vehicle. Human space travel should no more stop because one vehicle crashed that human air travel should stop because one plane crashes.
The purpose of human space travel is not science. The purpose of human space travel is to travel in space, just like the purpose of air travel is to travel in air. It's the destination that counts. We need to pick a destination.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
(HHOS)
I hope we are seeing the end of a very ugly way of thinking.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Yes, but one factor you've left out is that in most cases, the goverment also funds the development and research. Most companies aren't going to risk the capital to develope something the goverment "might" buy. Sure, they might throw some bones at certain projects and programs which have great potential, but in reality, no dough - no show.
Hint: V2 was the first rocket to go into space, and then there was Russia, you know, first PEOPLE IN SPACE ;-)
Fortunately NASA is upholding this grand tradition of investigating space with public funds in your name. Of course you don't get to go. And people die. But trust them, they'll come up with a good reason.
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"Why are they trying to hide the obvious possibility that it was ICE and not foam insulation that broke off and hit the left wing of STS-107?
o st s?page=1464
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/835531/p
Foam insulation is light and fluffy and reddish-orange. Ice is white and collects quickly on the outside of cryogenic containers, and near the leading edges of aircraft, and can be hard and heavy enough to knock a few ceramic tiles off when moving at supersonic speeds. These are not stupid people in charge of this investigation. So why are they so slow to make this disclosure?
Now that must be one Magic piece of foam...
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
The US needs to separate their manned space activities from cargo delivery. Sure, we can use the current design for a while more, but it would make more economic sense to stop driving an 18-wheeler to the supermarket. What we need is a toyota.
What I mean is that we need a smaller, manned spaceplane and a larger, heavy-lift system which can carry the spaceplane as an addition to a medium-size payload.
What I propose is to have a system where 8 SRBs launch two shuttle main tank assemblies. One filled with fuel, with a rocket motor on the ass end. The other can be filled with cargo. Some of the things we need to launch are not so much HEAVY as they are bulky. A good example would be an inflatable habitation module for lunar or ISS use. Not particularly heavy, but it's bulky.
The shuttle spaceplane should be much smaller and lighter. For operations requiring extravehicular manipulation of cargo, the shuttle and heavy lift system could simply dock in orbit. An added benefit could be that we build a spaceplane that can dock with a fuel tank in orbit and head off to the moon. We really should be building there instead of in low earth orbit. There are building materials on the moon, and none in the vacuum of space. The moon doesn't need energy to maintain orbit, and we can safely park a nuclear reactor there without worrying about reentry. That power can be used for excavation. This way we don't have to bring our entire living quarters with us. We can make cement structures on the moon instead. It seems very reasonable to do this instead of all this mars crap.
I did my own this animation of the shuttle sensor data found on the NASA page here. I have a /. journal entry for it here.
My, admittedly amateur, conclusion is that one of the carbon shields located on the front of the wing (right ahead of the wheel well) failed for some reason. Check out the animation page to see why I say this.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
If it came apart first, nothing but pieces will ever be found...
ThosEM
ninnle
I just find it amazing that when an accident like this happens, which at the root, is obviously the result of poor funding to begin with, the public responds with the equivalent of "OMG!!!!!!! LETS CUT NASA FUNDING!!!!!"
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
I don't see why not.
We are already paying for this atrocity as it is. NASA is not about real science anyway. It's a waste of resources to continue with the shuttle program. The moon was reached 30+ years ago, no we have gliding re-entry vehicles that can't reach the moon?
Find problem, examine problem, fix problem, learn from problem, push forward. Sure worked (and still does) for trains, planes, and automobiles...
And get the astronauts comfy pillows while you're at it, we don't need any embarrassing episodes up there.
--
"We'd be quicker playing pick-up-sticks with our butt-cheeks than we would be getting outta here"
Sounds like you have little faith in NASA, it's engineers and astronauts. Much COULD HAVE been done if a proper debris analysis, ground and space photos etc. confirmed the likelihood of a disaster. Atlantis was on the pad ready to launch within 1 week for a rescue mission. I believe NASA is a CAN DO agency, and when I hear NOTHING COULD BE DONE and we can't do this and we can't do that, I think we sell NASA short. If you don't believe me, check here which states:
"Could another shuttle have been sent up? Shuttle Atlantis might have been rushed into service, and if normal testing were skipped, it might have been in space in a week or so. The Columbia crew had enough supplies to last through Wednesday, Feb. 5 and might have been able to stretch those supplies a few more days."
It's nice to know that three pieces of FOAM will damage a $50 million space shuttle.
Zodiac Survey
Did the magic foam come from the grassy knoll?
tell that to microsoft.
MS is a monopolistic business which self evaluates, self polices and has little in the way of market pressures to deal with in order to continue to exist.
it doesn't make a difference.
Aerogel.
"You'll note also that it took people outsid of NASA to subversively reveal the trouble with the O-rings."
But in this case, it looks as if people inside Boeing are the ones revealing the trouble (anonymously).
And then sacked.
This just doesn't seem like good engineering. The traditional Apollo/Soyuz reentry vehicles had few if any of those risk factors. Compare what happened to Columbia with what happened to Soyuz 5: the reentry module failed to separate from the service module and entered into the atmosphere backwards. But when the service module had burned off, the reentry module righted itself (just because of its weight distribution--that's what it was designed to do) and Volynov landed and survived. Those reentry vehicles require no electronics and no flight control. The only thing that needs to happen is that the parachutes open some time before the capsule hits the ground. I think I'd have a bit more confidence in something like a Soyuz reentry vehicle than in the shuttle. And they are probably a lot cheaper, too.
This is a bit of a tangent, but...
This guy has written a report for NASA about the short term feasability of a Space Elevator, which would completely revolutionize access to space.
On the other hand, his english is sometimes not much better than CmdrTaco.
So, my question would be, does anyone know this guy, or know about what he's talking about enough, to tell us if this is at all feasible, and whether it would be a good replacement of our barbaric shuttles and rockets? S. Loisel
The NTSB should be conducting the accident investigation. They have crediblity with the public and Congress. They also have the relevant experience.
Happy Fun Ball is for external use only.
Ninnle: more than just baby talk!
Unrelated to the news at hand....
I heard in the news that some 1,500 + parts have been recovered. Are there any estimates as to what percentage of the space shuttle this might comprise? It would be interesting to see how much of the shuttle they expect to recover and wether or not the amount recovered so far might help to elimitate other theories.
i think most people forget this:
1. companies, yes even private ones, have their fair share of waste and inefficiency. when the competition gets tough, do they get smart? hell no. they cut corners, cheat, lie & steal just as if they were a living breathing entity. so if you think private companies are the obvious solution, just think of the ford explorer and firestone. think of enron. and all the other ones that appear clean, just haven't been caught.
2. the reason governments exist is to handle things that any one company cannot handle. are they wasteful, inefficient, and corrupt? you betcha. but no worse then your private companies..just different. but governments have a small advantage stability-wise that companies don't.
in the case of the shuttle it's just like other things...like air defense. it's government run...but there are thousands of civilian contractors. private companies that compete to provide parts, technology & services.
do you want our interstates to be managed and built by multiple private companies? how about our military? get rid of the federal reserve, and just let private companies print money?
flying shit into space is hard, if it's so easy, show me the overwhelming examples of private space programs.
*crickets*
that's what i thought.
for the time being, space travel is the domain of governements.
third degree burns
Sometimes they do. Sometimes they don't. Certainly wherever possible the manufacturers nail down the contract on specifications.
More often than not even when this happens more than one manufacturer is in the hunt and the losers can still lose quite a bit of money.
Sometimes, more often than I think most people think, the manufacturers absorb all development costs and then shop the product around. If they can't find a buyer, they get hosed.
Of course if they *do* they're rolling in it, at least for a time.
There's certainly no question that military money drives aircraft development though. That goes right back to the begining, when the Wrights "bet the farm" on an army contract. But they took the risk.
On the flip side there is one NASA, under the Congressional thumb, with one Space Shuttle and a development program that's been completely moribund for 20 years and way in sight to break out of that.
KFG
space travel is the domain of governments."
Absolutely. I've never denied it.
(By the way. Most of our Interstates *are* built by mulitple private companies. The government isn't in the paving business. They hire the work out. The same goes for the Space Shuttle too, that's why we're talking about Boeing and Morton-Thiokol)
KFG
Sure, that'll happen. Right after Congress passes a bill to award $1 billion to the first private investor that explodes a 50 kiloton atomic device.
Maybe I should go downtown and pay a kid with a knife $100 to listen to my PIN number and walk with me to the nearest ATM.
In 1978 Pournelle was naive. Now he's just stupid.
Look, in spite of the problems that the Shuttle program has had, it's still safer than your freeway drive to work. The ultimate bottom line is that I'd be on the next one, if they called.
HDGary secures my bank
Do they get the money? HIGHLIFTSYSTEM.COM
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
The Chronicle was probably the last paper in the world to cover the Enron collapse. Seriously, the Tierra del Fuego Daily Bugler and the Istanbul Intelligencer-Post were in town two weeks, sending back daily stories, and the Chron kept burying it on page eight. Fortunately NASA is entirely insulated from the free market by protective layers of red tape and pork, so the Chron can whip their asses all day every day.
I want NASA's budget cut because they have failed to provide a ship that meets the original design parameters.
Yeah, if we just get rid of all their mechanical engineers, I'll bet they could build much more reliable shuttles!
Most notably the shuttle's turn around time and payload size. Both of which were cut way back from the original goals.
Yeah. Bastards. NASA is the only organization that doesn't meet initial estimates. Unlike, say, software companies.
No one else *builds* shuttles, you know? It's a little bit hard to *make* accurate estimates. If they simply underestimated everything, would *that* make you happy?
NASA in my opinion is mishandling our money. This has been my opinion for almost 20 years. Two shuttle accidents just prove my point.
You're cranky because of an accident a *decade*? Hell, Ford would *kill* for that kind of record, and they have a *much* easier task to do.
Ignoring for the moment the lives lost: If this had been a normal rocket we had lost then we would not have lost so much money.
The lives lost are essentially irrelevant. Maybe in a couple of hundred million years of shuttle flights, it'll measure up to some of the *other* things that we've done, like WWII or Vietnam. Why do you think they used only military personnel on the shuttle for years and years?
As for being a normal rocket and cost -- sure, it would have cost less. OTOH, the cost *per flight* would have been higher, because the vehicle wouldn't be reusable. There's a *reason* they built the shuttle, laddie buck.
If the shuttle flights were occurring more often then it would have been comparable with loosing say an airliner. Annoying but within expectations. The number of flights would pay for a shuttle loss quicker, maybe enough to be factored into the costs. As it is we have lost a very expensive craft used for very rare missions. 5-6 launches a year is a sorry waste of my tax money for a system designed as if it was running 50 times a year.
Had you been less ignorant about what you were talking about, you'd be aware that the reason shuttle flights were cut so far back from original design parameters is *because* NASA had their funding cut so much since the moon landings.
This is pork barrel spending at it worst hiding behind science and patriotism.
Yeah! We could *obviously* put the money into pursuits *far* more productive for the human race, like blowing up Iraqis! Are you stupid?
May we never see th
How is this different from the O-ring issue with challenger? Do you think people just magically knew about O-rings? Or do you think that the people who worked for M-T managed to (anonymously) get information to the commission investigating the disaster?
carried 25 tons of cargo with it into space.
Clear, Dark Skies
check out Joseph T. Keiser's research interest here:
http://www.chem.psu.edu/profs/keiser02.html
He was working on this type of problem before he went to Penn State.
If I remember his explaination, there are 2 type of ice that form on the SOFI(spray on foam insulation), one is a powdery kind that on liftoff just blows away, the other was a thick ice chunck that could damage the heat tiles.
He was using near IR spectroscopy to find the density of the ice. However, he was using a intergation sphere to enhance the sensitivity. This might preclude his instrument from being used.
Now, there is another company that does near ir spectral imaging that has several instrument that might be up to the challenge. That is spectral dimensions which is located in columbia, md. here is their web address:
http://www.spectraldimensions.com/
EnkiduEOT
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself
-Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye
I notice there are no posts of the "I am an Engineer on the Shuttle Project and This is My Opinion" variety.
I'm part relieved that there are actual geeks that don't waste their time reading slashdot, and part dismayed that slashdot hasn't become the place where that sort of information is found.
Logos, Credibility, journalistic integrity.
...or does it seem odd that a multi-billion dollar spacecraft can be damaged and ultimately destroyed by a piece of foam? How large/dense was this foam? What was its purpose?
If this is about the disapperance of the Democratic Party from national politics we might discover what went wrong with Columbia. That's not a sophmoric wisecrack but an observation that not much is likely to happen that makes sense -- such as properly funding a space program -- when there is no intelligent friction in our government. And we most certainly not likely to find a "real cause" when it may be the federal budget that caused the tragedy. If these guys keep rubbing each other's shoes under the table we're never going to recover any sense of the nation we once were.
Those who trade freedom for security will soon have neither.
So, contract out. Knock, knock, XIAN.
A few decades ago, a Russian manned craft had a solar panel improperly extend. As a result, batteries necessary for deploying reentry chutes could not recharge. Mission Control knew that he was very likely going to die upon reentry, so they found his wife, and let them have a few minutes alone on the radio. Then they initiated reentry, which of course the cosmonaut did not survive.
I think it would have made a big difference to say goodbye.
A NYC lawyer blogs. http://www.chuangblog.com/
This is no baby foam. The scene is visible to ground telescope miles below, which doesn't look like a tile hitting the wing. Its more like a dinosau shit hitting a helicopter.
How the heck did this ignorant A/C post get modded up to 5? NASA already has a big piece of the left wing, see here.
What they can learn from it, and what they will admit after they do are different issues, but moding someone up to 5 when they shoot their mouth off as an A/C and claim that something can't happen when it's well known that it already has doesn't make much sense.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I'm in agreement, but just want to make a few corrections to the hypothetical scenario:
If Atlantis went up on a rescue mission, there'd only be two people on board, not another 7. Two is the minimum needed to fly a shuttle.
Also, they're always supposed to have one or two simple EVA suits for emergencies, specifically to manually close and secure the payload bay doors if the automatics fail. The rescue shuttle could bring the additional suits for the rescue op. Because this emergency EVA needs to be performed regardless of what payload is on board, I am guessing there's an alternate way to get out and back in.
Finally, IIRC as part of the emergency ditching procedure, they blow the egress hatch out and slide down a pole to get away from the shuttle. Last person out could blow the hatch to get to the rescue shuttle; Columbia would have been declared a loss at that point anyway.
I suggest you take a look at these email messages released by NASA. Are they telling us everything they know? I doubt it. But this doesn't appear to be an attempt to bury the whole thing under "spin" either.
You mention Jerry Pournelle and don't mention his best work "Footfall"! How can you not mention a book about two trunked elephants from outer space who invade Kansas? It just doesn't get better.
--
RumorsDaily
A friend sent me this last week: "I talked to my good friend who has some business with the defense
industry folks. Simply put, there will be some smoke and mirrors on the
Shuttle incident, and the public is not going to get the complete answer
as to why the shuttle played 52 card pickup."
Take with usual and customary grains of salt, don't shoot the messenger etc...
Need Mercedes parts ?
It's time for a new Shuttle.
The price of not getting one?
More Shuttles coming down in pieces and raining chunks of barbecued astronauts.
The public ultimately calling for a program shutdown.
And another step along the road of ceding whatever is left of US technological leadership to the rest of the world.
When our children go to space factories to work they may be going via Chinese or Indian spaceships. They may be doing this to escape the permanently depressed economy of a Third World nation.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I gave my left nut to cancer, and I don't want to give away my right nut...
It looks like I won't be going to space.
If I point out that you are incorrect, making me a foe does not make you any more correct.
But, alas we don't live in such an ideal world. And I read somewhere that NASA is changing their acronym to Needs Another Seven Astronauts.
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
The first step when in doubt has been to roll the shuttle with tiles down as it passes over Hawai`i. Reason being that a telescope on Maui's Haleakala can read the headline on a newspaper held at the pilot's window! Missing tiles can be seen. But the folks in Houston did not request these pictures. One telescope, in Arizona I think, caught some shots but it doesn't have the resolution of Haleakala. Question early in this investigation was why weren't those photos requested.
Those who trade freedom for security will soon have neither.
Anarchists never rule
Consider this. Which of the following two scenarios would be worse for NASA and the space program?
1. NASA tells the world shortly after the January 16th launch that critical damage was done to the Shuttle's heat shield. They inform the public that there is a high probability that the Shuttle will not survive re-entry and that they do not have the capability to fix the damage. The whole world pleads that something be done to save the astronauts for days or weeks.
2. NASA admits to incompetence "after the tradgedy" for failing to detect the damage that occurred on launch and preventing it from happening.
I think one has to seriously wonder what NASA knew, and more importantly, when they knew it.
The US won't have a real space program as long as NASA has any control over it. Real spacecraft will not be invented by a massive US govenment program any more than any other transportation system has been.
Government programs did not make the first aircraft, automobiles, locomotives, steamships (or sailing ships for that matter). Why should the first true spacecraft be any different? It does not take any more fuel to get a pound into orbit than it takes to fly a pound from the US to Australia. (yeah, airliners don't carry oxidizer - but bear with me).
The SSTO (X-whatever) that got funded and then killed was a damnable con job. It would be like Curtis Aviation promising to build a supersonic jumbo jet capable of flying 12,000 km at MACH 6 without refueling.
In 1908.
NASA does not "get" the idea of manned spaceflight. They "get" 20,000 jobs to keep some 20 year old experimental spacecraft flying at a cost of about 1 billion dollars per flight. Experimental spacecraft that were designed by political committes ten years earlier. Experimental spacecraft that the designers promised would be orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the Saturn V (1970 cost to launch a Saturn was around 100 million). An experimental spacecraft that would be re-uasable. Well the solid fuel boosters cost more to recover and refurbish than paying for new ones each time. And the Orbiter itself has a tendency to be pretty well rebuilt between flights. (Maintenance and upgrades)
We still need the orbital equivalent of the Wright Flyer. Then data from that design can be used in developing newer, better designs. What is not needed is "the most complicated machine ever built" (NASA's favorite way of describing the Shuttle)
But don't fret about Mankind's destiny among the stars - there are other countries besides the US that have space programs. Once the US government realizes that lack of a real space program with cheap access to space means condemning the USA to a role in international affairs somewhat less prestigious than what France now enjoys, there will be a new Space Race - one that won't be looking to an organization whose greatest claim to fame now is that they once sent some powdered orange drink to the Moon. (Ok, I know that Tang never made it to the Moon, but hte makers of Tang claimed it did)
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
not worth it to any single company right now. Only boeing has the resources, and they get money whether or not they accomplish the above. If you want companies to be incentive-driven to accomplish these tasks, bump that price up at least 10 times per challenge. A billion won't even pay for chump change with space travel.
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
citing a fox news article to try and back up your logic is like getting hitler to back you up as a good guy
The large section of hardened foam that we see fall is very rectangular. One has to wonder if it was not cut as part of some pre launch procedure and was not replaced with a wap of SuperGlue. Boeing is doing rather well on the financial front so let us not make an excuse for them there. NASA did a pre launch check of the Columbia but so far no showing of a pre launch check of the foam. This was not a money problem but a brain problem.
You've got to remember, this is in Florida where it's very, very humid all year long. The big fuel tank is at cryogenic temperatures (liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen temps). The humidity in the air is going to condense out and freeze solid in that foam covering on the tank just like a frozen sponge. Imagine a piece of matress foam saturated with water and then frozen to minus 180 degrees fahrenheit. It's more like a brick than foam. That's what really hit the edge and underside of the orbiter's wing.
. . .We would have had Lucifer's Hammer and Footfall up on the big screen instead of having to suffer through Armageddon and Independance day. But that's Hollywood for you, eh?
...if it's wrapped with duck tape.
Have you ever seen a duck break up in flight?
Off-topic, but the Iraqi SCUD missiles are basically V2 rockets. Low tech, but still capable.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
$50 million!? Surely it must be more than that. You could buy 2 or 3 F-15 fighter jets for that.
I would think it would be several hundred million, at least.
— darco
Contrast this with the solid rocket booster failure last time. That was an unexpected failure. Solid rocket boosters are proven, reliable components. The only reason they failed in 1986 is that the joints for assembling them into a stack were badly designed.
If you think about it, that means the shuttle is an even worse deal than usually assumed. Lifting mass into orbit is hugely expensive. First, we spend all that money lifting the huge mass of the shuttle itself into space, and then we bring it all back again? Imagine if every shuttle launch had left a carefully designed, multi-purpose transport vehicle and container of the size of the shuttle in space and returned the astronauts via a Soyuz-like capsule--the ISS could have been completed long ago from those vehicles and transport containers.
The more one thinks about it, the more wasteful and bizarre the shuttle program becomes.
Kind of an important point: Pournelle and Niven together are a good team. Niven alone is a good hard scifi writer. Pournelle alone...ehh.
Jack, that has to be one of the best done animated GIF's I have ever seen. Only 125KB too. It even came right up in my old Netscape 3. Just wanted to feed back I appreciated it. Your work put a lot of words into clearer perspective.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
I've seen a lot of comments about either privatizing NASA or doing something to otherwise make them compete. There seems to be an attitude that competitition increases innovation, but does it really?
It can, but it can also backfire. Examine the breakup of AT&T. Several good things came out of it: Better customer service, lower prices, more consumer freedom. But there were also losses. AT&T's entire research division is basically gone. Without it there would have been no C or UNIX.
The problem is that you have to make something profitable before a company will do anything, and generally it has to be profitable within the next three months. Remember, if you are running a company, you are answerable to the stockholders. If they loose money in a quarter, YOU get into trouble.
The problem is that a lot of cool things can't be done in three months, or eve three years. There has to be someone with deep pockets and less immeadate accountability to someone in order to try the financially risky stuff.
Major governments don't have the R&D money to get into space. Companies won't either, and if you privatize it, what you get is a space monopoly that can charge what it wants. It won't violate the antitrust act, because it won't have to. The massive money required to start anything will be sufficient barrier to entry.
What privatization often does is to set up businesses that don't innovate because they don't have the money to innovate. Everything has to go to beating out the other guy. Greater supply for less money is where all the creative energies go.
This will get us cheap sattelites, but very little in the way of scientific advancement or manned space travel, because it ISN'T profitable, and isn't forseen to be profitable in the near future.
Would hubble have gone up were NASA a private entity? Would it have even been built? There is no return on investment. Sure we've learned a lot of cool stuff, but it doesen't make people money tomorrow so it is of little value to a private company. Maybe it would have gone up, but then would the information recieved have been propritary? Only able to be looked at and used if you paid the price? Companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts.
How many journals etc are starting to require fees for access? How many articles have there been about the conflicts between libraries and publishers?
If space travel enters the private sector, I fear that it will become something that doesn't benefit society as a whole, but only those with the money to pay.
No more pure science done in space. If there's immeadate profit you get something done, if there isn't it might get done if you pay them enough to do it.
Such is the problem with pure science. It takes years or even decades before practical results are found, yet most if not all of our technology was based on discoveries made far earlier than the practical application.
There is a civil war coming in the United States. Remember which side has most of the guns
Got a typo there my friend!
Should read "Moron's first post"
cheers!
It'll be a long time before we have an answer.
Try "Falkenbergs Legion". It's more about war than science fiction but a fun read anyway.
karma capped
No, no, it was the space debris from the grassy knoll.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Thanks! It was a lot of work, but I think worth it.
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Given that 'logic', citing ABC, CBS, or NBC would be like having the butcher Stalin as a reference, then. Interesting.
i guess the idea is that companies are supposed to come up with some cheap way to do all those things
also, the money from the goverment wouldn't be their only source of income. if a company is able to accomplish any of that, they'll probably have at least a few clients interested
They most certainly do not replace all the tiles after every launch.
"that there are a lot of good people working for NASA"
There were a lot of good people working for Enron too, but that didn't make them a good company.
They are not private firms if they accept contracts from government. A private firm is a competitor in the open market who generates revenue through voluntary trade. Boeing (for example) generates a significant part of their revenue through force, which they inherit from government. Thus Boeing is not a true competitor in the market, because they are not engaging in voluntary trade. In other words, Boeing's customers (the taxpayers) did not choose Boeing because they want to -- they chose Boeing because they were forced to. Ultimately, Boeing represents a subdivision of government, and not a competitor in the open market.
All Bush needs to do to get funding is figure some way to work this disaster into the 'War On Terrorism' like he has done with CD copying, 'The War On Drugs', and a dozen environmental issues.
I mean, if he can get a bill that allows logging in a national park past , has a dozen national parks which protect endangered wildlife turned into army training grounds, and opens up artic wildlife reserves for oil drilling all in an 'effort to fight terrorism' I don't see why getting funding for building a better space shuttle should be that difficult.
Remember, if your using a regionless DVD player the terrorists have already won...
-Sternn
And this has exactly what relevance to the grandparent comment? Your analogy is absolutely useless in this argument.
indigo asserts:
[Bounty for private space flight] not worth it to any single company right now. Only boeing has the resources,
Not true, first off, if such bounties were available, companies (or consoritums of companies) will be coming out of the woodwork to try for them. Secondly, there are companies other than Boeing there right now that are in a position to start working on this, big ones like Lockheed Martin, to little ones like Scaled Composites and XCOR. A bounty for successful milestones would make VC funds more accessible to companies with good ideas.
The problem I see with this is: a bounty for successful milestones would also make VC funds more accessible to companies with bad ideas. Companies working with a focus on the bottom line cut corners; in space travel, corners cut cost lives. Seven astronauts who knew the risks was bad enough; I don't want to see some moron going up on a half designed rocket, having a guidance failure and crashing in a crowded city center, taking out people who were just trying to go to work.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
Excellent animation - it might be from an amateur but its very logical and instructive.
What wonders me most is not the talk about foam damaging a wing(thats so unbelieveable to me ... I wait some years before I consider to believe that) ... what wonders me is: it seems there was no man with a space suit on board who had the ability to go outside and examine the space shuttle in orbit. Right?
... I simply start to believe that NASA and even the pilots and commanders get realy uncautious. Obviously there is no safty margin at all.
... especialy if you consider the lost lives wich could have been saved easy.
... or a robot wich is able to walk on the surface of the craft?
... very sad.
If that is the case
I mean, why do we have an ISS? I would say to be able to stay there for some days if reentrance is to dangerous.
Why do we have EVA capabilities? To get out and investigate, I would say.
Obviously even that was to expensive, no person with the knowledge or training was on board, no one went outside and looked how server the space craft was damaged.
Wouldnd it make far more sense to drop one scientist and have an EVA specialist on board, allways? The extra weight for an additional suit can't be that much IMHO
Further more, why is the robotic arm of the cargobay not able to examine the outise with a simple camara, probably thats even easyer
I think the whole responisbility chain is run by idiots. A simple SF author would come up with 20s of scenarios how to react more proper in such a situation than the NASA did
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
I've heard many conflicting reports of whether they (Columbia) could have done an EVA due to limited equipment, whether another shuttle could have even been ready to go, etc., but is ther a list of things Columbia was actually capable of in orbit? Docking with ISS was out of the question--no docking capability, but getting close enough (not enough fuel?? wrong orbit?) and then doing an EVA with the few suits they have on ISS??.
What comes to mind is the scene in Apollo 13 where the Engineers get a bucketload of parts on a table and have to come up with a way to get the CO2 out of the air. They did it, but they at least had a parts list. Does a list of ALL the realistic options (even some too risky) exist in this case?
What exactly do you mean by "Don't touch this button?"
that was said before the Hubble Telescope.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
Yes, I agree. You did an outstanding job.
Most of what you have to say makes good sense.
The astronauts are well aware that with each launch, they have a 50% to 70% chance of being killed.
The true chance of being killed in a space flight is on the order of 1 to 2 per hundred. If it were truely as high as you suggest, we would expect fatalities of half of the flights.
All this brings a chapter in one of Richard Feynman's books where he discusses his role in the Challenger investigation. The engineers who knew the Shuttle thought that the risk of catasctophic accident was about 1 in 100 and perhaps one in 1,000. Management decided that, since human lives were involved, rates of 1 in 100,000 were officially quoted. That management and the engineers had such disparate estimates of the risks demonstrated the lack of communication.
We need to accept that space travel is an inherently risky endeavour and accept that accident rates on the order of 1 per hundred flights are perhaps the best that our technology can achieve right now.
I have discovered a truly marvelous sig, unfortunately the sig limit is too small to contain i
That's *exactly* the point some engineers at Boeing are trying to make. The junior engineers that Boeing management set to examine the foam impact simply disregarded the data that were coming out of the software, because the software "tended to be conservative".
Who are you to argue with them?
I'm an aerospace engineer with some 20+ years of experience.
scientists don't go rushing and jumping to conclusions
Sure, but neither NASA nor Boeing are managed by scientists. It's the MBAs who make the decisions and, in order to cut costs, they sent junior engineers to do work they couldn't do properly, due to their lack of experience.
Great job. You may be interested to know that Edward Tufte describes in one of his books how data that could have saved the Challenger was available before the flight, but no one had done a proper presentation that showed clearly the relation between o-ring failures and ambient temperature at launch. Possibly, someone will find also data regarding tile damage that, if properly organized and presented, could have shed some light on the Columbia disaster as well.
For the most part this is not true. The military has poured vasts amount of *money* into certain areas (notably airplanes, their involvment in the others is actually miniscule).
No argument there. Most millitary R&D is done in the private sector, but it's still paid for by the millitary, developed in conjunction with the millitary, and created to millitary specifications.
Airplanes, rockets, satellite imaging and communications, GPS, radar, nuclear power, materials science, and many other modern technologies owe much to millitary initiatives.
Once the millitary applications have paid the bills and provided the incentive to create something, then the technology rapidly trickles down into private industry and, directly or indirectly, to us ordinary consumers.
Yeah, the stakes are too big. Offer the bounties AND a total monopoly on manned spaceflight for, say, 100 years. Or total exclusive rights to all mining, research, and travel on the moon for the same period. Or exclusive rights to all space-based power schemes.
A couple of billion is chump change. VCs want a ROI in the hundred-fold realm, not the 25-100% perfect-case scenerios that these low figures would offer. That money would be hard pressed to create these systems, much less make them profitable.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Space is over rated. We haven't even explored our own ocean. Something like 2% of life is on land. The other 98% is in the ocean.
Gingrich did repeatedly suggest privatizing the space program. He wanted it to be commericalized, and he basically regarded the existing program as "high-tech socialism."
He also found time to criticize NASA for not taking more risks, saying the US space effort was being made "as boring as possible" -- this after slashing NASA's budget by a third. Let's face it -- a politician like Newt would have exactly the sort of attention span necessary to start on a plan like this and not follow through. Gingrich was full of "whiz bang" privatization ideas that had little substance or experience behind them. Whatever Pournelle thought he'd convinced Newt of some afternoon, whatever modern-day Longitude prizes they talked about, that wasn't real. Pournelle's being naive about the sort of man he was dealing with, among other things.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Don't you mean Private sector?
Competition and market forces are great for some things, but for something as big as space exploration we need a gov't-directed (preferably international) project. This was there can at least be some lip service paid to "the good of humankind." A private corp doing this would be very limited (space tourism, launching satelites). Look at biomedical research, for example. To make money you have to go after the commonest diseases and ignore the rest. This is great, and makes perfect business sense, but you also need publicly-funded research for the not so lucrative diseases and for the general advancement of biological sciences.
More relevantly, take Lewis & Clark's exploration of the frontier of their time. It was directed at opening the West to settlement and commerce by european people, and it achieved its goal (for better or for worse.) Take out the racism and genocide, and that's kind of what we all hope NASA is up to - openning up space to our eventual settlement.
For that matter, maybe you should go to the hardware store, grab a couple of strings, shove them up your ass and become Howdy Doody.
See, I can do superfluous analogies too!
The truly sad part of the Challenger 'catastrophic disassembly' was this: on first ignition of the SRBs, a huge plume of solid fuel was seen ejecting from a massive leak in an o-ring seal. No one saw this, of course, because the images were taken on FILM! Not processed till later, when it did absolutely no good except to verify why the accident occurred. If ONE PERSON had been watching a -live- monitor, the flight could have been aborted safely. Yeah, let's cut the budget some more, get rid of more staff - that'll help.
Yeah, shut down the space program, all you damn slackers get back to work!!! Champagne is expensive, dammit!!
VERY well done, but seems to run a bit fast.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Meanwhile, it actually costs approximately $24,000,000 to launch a Soyuz (that's the incremental costs), and a Soyuz carries 1/3rd the people and no cargo. Three Soyuz launches and four Progress launches would be needed to match what the Shuttle could do with one flight, a Progress launch costs about $20,000,000, so that's a total of around $150,000,000 for the equivalent of what the Shuttle does for $100,000,000, so you can see that the Shuttle is actually more cost-effective than the Soyuz/Progress combo -- if the cost of all that bloated infrastructure was divided over more flights.
Unfortunately, the current design of the Shuttle insures that a) there won't be more Shuttles because they're too expensive, and b) there won't be more flights because they require too much overhaul and re-work (and the fact that we have only a single VAB to put together Shuttle stacks, and only three launch pads for the Shuttle only one of which is routinely used because the other two have been stripped for spare parts to keep the single operational pad up and going, doesn't help either).
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
Now that carbon nanotubes have been produced, and have shown to have a suffient strength to weight ratio, and are being produced in macroscopic lengths, the base technology for a space elevator appear within sight. It's strange that no contest was required. By contrast, enormous money has been dumped into hypersonic scram jet engines, and we don't have a working engine yet. Prize or no prize, without a base of technology, it will remain a dream.
Still, offering prizes might work, but the goals need to be revised. At a failure per 50, going to space with humans should absolutely require humans in space. (Yes, don't repair the HST - send up another one). Robots can do anything humans can do now in space cheaper. From a safety stand point, note that Galileo will be flown to destruction at Jupiter as the natural end of the program. Got a one-way mission? Send a robot!
The only goal I can think of worth risking humans is building self sustaining colonies in space (L5 Society), on the Moon, or Mars. To achieve these goals, you need to radically cut the cost going to orbit (space elevator) or radically cut the mass you need to put into orbit. You need artificial gravity. You need a self sustaining biosphere. For Mars, you need serious radiation protection for the trip. (To go to the moon, you need to be lucky - which we were for Apollo). (Once there, you can go underground for radiation protection on either the Moon or Mars.)
ISS and the shuttle are not getting us to these goals. There is no progress, so these programs should be axed or radically revised.
A proposal for ISS was to use inflatable structures. This would radically cut the weight (and cost) of the station. We went with high cost without progress.
Artificial gravity can be achieved by spinning. Perhaps some booster upper stage could be tethered to a station, and the whole thing spun up. (You also need to allow docking to other space craft, and deal with emergency exit - all perhaps at a slow moving center.)
Biosphere 2 (on the ground) showed that building a working biosphere is difficult. We need to keep at it.
We have now soft landed a probe on a minor planet (Eros). One way to reduce mass required in orbit is to make use of material that's already there. There's lots of material to use in Earth crossing orbits. But we haven't studied these bodies enough to know how to use it.
$5 billion for 3 years of a space station would make ISS look extremely expensive. We're at, what, $95 billion for ISS? I remember when $25 billion was the cap.
The carrot has already been dangled for EELV. We now have successful launches of multiple boosters. Oddly, it has contributed to a world wide booster market glut. This may be a good thing. But EELV is, by definition, not a radical change in booster design. SSTO (single stage to orbit), etc., are radical.
The Mars Pathfinder program showed that a cheap robot sending pictures home can be a good public relations tool, while achieving real science.
Half of the probes to Mars have failed so far. Reliability needs to be demonstrated before sending humans there.
When do you stop using a successful resusable launcher? When it fails? Will the shuttle program end when we run out of shuttles? The shuttle's life has already been extended...
-- Stephen.
Here's my proposal: shut down NASA altogether, then take all the money we were using to fund it, and send it to Russia instead. Obviously, they'll make far more effective use of the money than we will.
The Russian's have their own amount of graft going on, I remember a 20/20 special on the Russian Space Agency. It was something to the effect of Engineers going hungry and looting Mir resupply shuttles for food, but the top brass in Russia were using US funds to build giant houses for themselves.
I personally think the space program should go commercial, or we should fund India's space program. Ours and Russias are relics of the Cold War.
The technology sometimes got developed into real products, sometimes just sat on a shelf waiting until someone could use it.
The real reason for the Space Shuttle was to learn how to build and operate a Space Shuttle, because there had never been anything like it before. I'll grant, it wasn't the most efficient way of doing it, or the best possible vehicle, but it does remain the only one - even as it is, the only Space Shuttle is the best Space Shuttle.
We know - now - that it can be done better. Great, build upon that. There are many ways, from government doing it itself (probably not the best way, but would get it done), to joint ventures or assistance (often break down from disagreements ovr design or funding, like the Lockheed VentuStar), to just throwing the technology out and letting the free market do something with it (there's no market at the moment, so that's not going to happen).
The government building the Space Shuttle was one way of doing it, and probably the only viable one when it was proposed, because the idea of a reusable space vehicle was merely speculation - nobody knew if it would work, how expensive it would be, how reliable, and so on. After it was done, you learn the lessons, and you can try again - if you have the money. The Soviet Union did, for a while, but the Buran only flew once - it would have given a lot more information on what works and what doesn't if it had kept flying, but since it didn't, there's a new mindset that the Space Shuttle is the "only way" to do it. Government involvement will be necessary to get beyond that now, but at least now there is more than the government-only option.
And now that the Space Shuttle exists, there's also a benchmark to measure against, as a target to exceed. Before, the goal was basically just to get it to fly, and not much more. Now there are targets we know are more reasonable based on this experience.
As an aside, the Lockheed "VentuStar" program looked promising, but what would have been better is to fund prototypes for all three proposals (low-tech DC-X, medium tech Shuttle II, high tech VentuStar), and then let them compete. It would also have taken immense amounts of money though, but that might be what's needed to get the market for reusable vehicles started...
Doesn't have what you'd call facts or information. And even its facts aren't that good (e.g. Buran wasn't an "exact replica" of the STS - though it looked similar, Buran didn't even have main engines, it was strapped to a rocket).
Its called "stupid simple".
I push the people I work with to design in this way for high volume web sites. Engineers and programmer's natural instinct is to build more and more complex systems that fail in completely unexplained ways.
Instead, consider the Anvil. It always works *because it's default state is to work*.
What you describe with Soyuz is pure elegance. When something breaks, it tends to fix itself and keep working.
Oh well. Its a hard lesson to learn, and very few programmers and engineers are capable of designing that way.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
India is in such a poor state currently because it was basically a British slave state until about 50-60 years ago, it has billions of people and is in the proccess of switching from an agrarian economy to a capitailist one. The fact that they are at the state they are today is amazing. The corruption isn't the cause, the corruption is a side effect (look at the USSR). My guess is should India continue on its current path it will be a super power in maybe 100 years or less (something close to half the time it took the US).
As for the European Space Agency? Get real the Euros are lucky they can agree on the pictures on their curreny much less run a decent space program. Sure they aren't corrupt, but they don't work well together and the bulk of the European contries are socialist states, and boy do those guys spend money.
My money in the future is on the Indians and/or the Chinese. Heck if you out sourced NASA to India you would save billions on engineers alone!!!!!
5. The payments made shall be exempt from all US taxes.
You are pushing it!
5. 10 billion to the first company to prove a working business model and profits for 10 years.
It seems like you did a lot of research on this so maybe you can answer a question I had from the day of the tragedy. How does the landing gear get released?
So far as I know it is a pretty standard aircraft-style system: A hydralic actuator pushes down the gear hinges, which is hinged at the top and connected via a hinged arm to the gear bay covers. The gear bay covers are two parts, each hinged at the side, which open as the gear comes down. Once the whole thing is down another actuator pushes down a collar that locks the gear in that position.
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Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?