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NASA To Try To Resume Flights By Fall
underground alliance writes "According to BBC News, space shuttle flights could resume as early as this fall. The article says that 'Engineers have been put on standby to fix problems already raised by the investigating board, and devise a way of checking the exterior shuttle for defects while it is in orbit.' I think that this is a good move especially since ISS construction has been put on hold because without the space shuttle. The space shuttle is the only heavy freighter and the only means of putting a new ISS component in space."
Should they happen to devise a method of checking the shuttle while in orbit for defect, what would happen should they find a defect on a shuttle in space? Do they have the ability to fix defects while in space?
And lastly, how many people can the Soyuz capsules handle? If the shuttle could not handle a landing they might have to orphan it in space and send up multiple Soyuz capsules, or a second shuttle?
Now of course you can take *some* supplies with you but not necessarily an entire space shuttle of spares. So what would happen if they find a problem that would stop re-entry but can't fix whilst in orbit? Of course you would hope that they would detect this sort of thing before lift off but you never know. Has NASA ever had two shuttles up at once?
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What about the possibility of using the Russian Space Shuttles? I havent heard anything about this. I did some research on the web, and the russian government said back in 1997 that they had the means and the will to get their program back online. The design is better, can carry more cargo, is safer to refuel and more modern! I think NASA should do some serious consideration into using MOLNIYA and the BURAN space shuttles as their 'cargo carriers'. Any comments anyone?
In addition of having seven go up at one time, have another seven train with them and use them to pilot the second shuttle. Itll would be much cheaper then hauling all the potentially needless safety equipment every flight.
Of course it wouldnt hurt the first shuttle to have more diagnostics and sensors.
This point WAS being addressed by the European Space Agency when they were still considering their own shuttle. In fact, This Guy's project came out of that research.
On a side note, Michel's jump is to take place just a few miles from where I live. :-)
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
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To find defects while in orbit, How about electrically charging the exterior of the shuttle and then checking for inconsistancies in the EM field. (read: differences from a "good condition" exterior, maybe from a test conducted on the ground). Maybe this has already been suggested, who knows - but it might be worth a shot.
At the risk of being flamed, are we putting too much emphasis on human life? Historically, all exploration has been risky, with significant loss of life. As an example, look at the original Jamestown settlers. The astronauts are well aware of the dangers involved in spaceflight. And if they didn't know before, they should know after both the Challenger and Columbia accidents. So if they are willing to take the risk with the current design, should we stop them? If the engineers say, there is no way we can improve on Feynman's odds of 1 in 50, should we stop them? It seems to me, that the astronauts should have the final say in what is safe enough. If they're willing to take the risk, as informed adults, I'm willing to let them take it.
It cost too much money per pound to load the shuttle with all the gear you request of it. A better move would be to have a simple emergency rocket with extra food/air/fuel ready to send up should they discover that the shuttle is unable to return.
.5 billion and can only fly 4 times a year.
An even better option is admit we've got a flawed system and do the sensible thing and abandon it.
Don't get me wrong. I'm all for manned space flight. But we need to set a real goal. Like Men on Mars by 2020 or bust and then build the needed items like a space elevator, moon base to mine Helium, and a space station that is able to rotate so that we can simulate gravity.
The Space elevator could possibly be built at a cost of $7-15 billion dollars. Each shuttle trip cost
The moon base can mine the fuel needed to power nuclear engines for a Mars trip.
A rotating space station is needed to simulate gravity. We are going to have to provide gravity to any one going on this trip. Our past experience on Mir proved that weightlessness is harmful to our bone structure over the long haul.
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Columbia wass the only shuttle that has real difficulity getting to ISS (this was covered after the origional accident). Now all shuttles can get there, though admitidly not all orbits make it easy. Though we can get around that. (send an atlas up with supplies, a few space suits, and a second rocket designed to change orbits, or devise a way to refuel. Nothing easy of course)
And has been pointed out, nearly all shuttle missions are ISS missions. If you arrive at the ISS and someone says "The shuttle won't get you home safely", then you just sit tight, in crowded conditions. In fact given a docked shuttle that can't safely get back home I could see engineers devisiong a way to use it as a part of ISS since it is there. A second airlock for remaining shuttles would have to be added, and a lot of details, but getting things into orbit is hard, if you got something on the ISS you want to use it for the ISS as much as possiable. Who cares that it is mostly useless, if nothing else use it as a private office for someone who just wants to be alone.
Check out this critique of the Shuttle design, complete with a lot of technical and political analysis:
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/oped-03l.html
The shuttle clearly compromises crew safety by its fundamental design. Given it's mounting location, extreme diligence is required to protect the orbiter from the external tank and other propulsion components.
>NASA space flights should stay suspended until
>they can develop a next generation launch
>vehicle that is safe.
What does "safe" mean? Launching people into orbit and returning them again isn't fundamentally a proposition.
A next-generation spaceframe may very well take advantage of lessons we've learned with the Shuttle, and certainly won't be vulnerable to any issues found to be fatal in it. Nonetheless, I'm sure, this being reality, that brand new flaws and weaknesses will be exposed.
Please note: upgrade to the latest Microsoft operating system because it's finally safe.
NASA should resume flights as soon as they determine that whatever actually was the catalytic element in the Columbia loss isn't a structural issue. If it's a "there a 1% chance of it happening on any given flight" issue, flights should resume immediately, while parallel efforts are made to reduce that chance, if practical, and also while further parallel efforts work towards a future spaceframe.
The Challenger "O" ring issue was one of shoddy workmanship by the lowest bidder, that would have raised its ugly head time and time again. Columbia... was the foam flawed? Was it wind-sheer? Fluke? The investigation will tell us.
"Oh no... he found the
NASA should have 2 systems.
1) A honking powerful rocket to lauch heavy payload to wherever they want. Safety is not an issue, just reliability.
2) A small, safe crew module that re-enters the way Apollo did. Everything focused on getting the crew to space and back as safely as possible.
Imagine a mission set up this way. Payload launchs on a Monday. It may be a LEO science project, something you don't need to go the space station with. It safely achieves orbit, and on Tuesday, up goes the crew. They dock with the module, spend a week doing experiments, load up whatever results you need to bring back home and splash down in the ocean. Maybe, to decrease the descend rate, they'll have some extra fuel to slow themselves down (like that very old computer game!). Science module burns up on de-orbit. Or maybe it could be boosted up to hook up with the space station.
...Is to just freakin put the Atlantis into space.
Some may say that this is irresponsible. I disagree. What happened to the Columbia was a freak accident, it won't happen again. At least for another 40->50 flights.
That should be enough time for Nasa and whoever else is involved to rethink their plans and design a couple of different types of craft.
In the meantime, they should stop acting like a bunch of pussies and just fly the shuttle. Let them run their investigations, which I realize are important, while the flights continue.
The FAA and NTSB don't stop commercial flights after a crash do they?
Huh?
That's a very interesting point. However there could be problems. What if (I'm just pulling this out of thin air) a shuttle in prolonged orbit starts to degrade. Something like repeated heating/cooling cycles cause tiles to get loose and fall off. That would become a terrible danger to the station. You don't want bits of tile floating around those solar panels.
There was a really great idea a while back about using the Shuttle's external tank as a space station. Unfortunately one of the problems was that the foam insulation would outgas for years. A shuttle abandoned at ISS might have some similar gotcha.
The question I've been thinking about is how you'd get rid of a lame shuttle that's docked at ISS. Ideally you'd try to land it at Edward's (in the event that it was damaged, unrepairable in orbit, but had a chance of making it back). But I don't know if the shuttles can be autopiloted during the last part of the approach. If not, then they'd probably want to ditch it into the Pacific. Which would be quite a challenge since if the shuttle breaks up it will fly *very* differently than if it basically survives. I'd guess they'd want to try reentry tail-first with the cargo bay doors open just to be sure of how it would behave.
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Because you can't leave a fully fueled/equipped shuttle sitting on a launch pad 24/7/365.
You can only keep the Liquid Oxygen and Hydrogen in the Main Tank for so long. The hypergolic fuels and consumables inside the shuttle can't just sit there for months at a time. Harsh weather can cause damage to the shuttle, tanks or SRB's when it's sitting on the pad. You'd have to have security and maintenance engineers babysitting the reserve shuttle on the pad 24 hours a day. It's just not feasible.
Geez, you wouldn't even need thrusters with the right design. Just have the arm or an astronaut place it adrift from the shuttle, then have the shuttle spin a half-revolution on its longitudinal axis.
The whole time the satellite is busy taking pictures and recording pictures.
Then do another half-revolution and retrieve the satellite.
Man, all we're really talking about here is a camera!
Is this truly the only Earth I can live on?
A real comparison of the cost of the Titian IV-B vs. the Shuttles needs to take into account the entire build / support / fuel / launch equation. It looks as though Shuttles are good for around 20 missions each on average before they blow themselves to bits. Tack on another $100,000,000 or so a launch for the amortized cost of each Shuttle vehicle (and stuff like major Shuttle overhauls), and suddenly the Titan IV-B becomes much, much cheaper than the Shuttle to build / support / fuel / launch.
>Myself, I'm not sure I'd take the word of a sportswriter.
Oh goodie, argument from authority. I suppose you don't put much weight in physics theories from patent clerks, either?
The "rebuttals" at hal-pc.org are pathetic nitpicks. They do nothing to undermine the basic thrust of Easterbrook's positions, which seem to be that the Shuttles are:
1) Outrageously expensive to build and operate compared to any other lift system.
2) More dangerous to their occupants than any other manned booster.
3) Incapable of living up to most of the promises that NASA made to Congress in order to get them built in the first place.
One of the "rebuttals" at hal-pc is so ignorant it defies description. Easterbrook asserts that, "a rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that, although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years." The author at hal-pc twitters on in his rebuttal about the B-52, and about how it may end up with a lifespan of over 90 years. Ignoring the fact that the first B-52 flew in 1954, which means the craft will need to remain in service for another 40 years (a completely baseless assertion), the type of energies and forces Shuttles are exposed to simply dwarf those experienced by a B-52. I'm guessing the Shuttles experience more forces acting on them in every launch / landing cycle than a B-52 can expect to experience in its entire operational lifetime. You might as well compare the Shuttle to a paper airplane. Even the SR-71, which the hal-pc author also cites, operates under conditions that are vastly less hostile to materials than those experienced by the Shuttles each and every launch.
As usual, Shuttle proponents can't come up with any positive arguments of their own for supporting the continuation of the Shuttle program, so instead resort to insane levels of nitpicking regarding any arguments against continuing the failed, costly, dangerous program.
>Myself, I think Easterbrook simply doesn't accept the fact
>some things have high inherent risk.
Manned spaceflight is inherently risky. That doesn't mean you should take on unnecessary risks - particularly when you don't gain anything by undertaking those risks, and when you're spending substantially more in the process to boot. I haven't read the Easterbrook articles in some time, but I believe he might even make a similar point in one of his articles. There was no good reason to trade in the Saturn V for the Shuttle. NASA lied to Congress, and the result is the expensive, deadly boondoggle we're stuck with today. This mistake should be rectified. The Shuttle should be scrapped, existing alternatives (such as Soyuz) utilized in the interim, and new, truly superior replacement manned vehicles should be developed. Once which are truly cheaper to build and operate than the current generation of manned launch vehicles, and which are safer, too, regardless of whether these vehicles are radically different from existing disposable boosters or simply the natural evolution of their design.
Actually, I think the article says the Russian Enterprise module is capable of docking two Soyuz capsules, each of which can evacuate six crew members, for a total of six.
The ISS only bear three permanent crew members, between shuttle flights, now, because that is the total number that can be evacuated by the single Soyuz it has mounted now.
The Soyuz are replaced every six months. There was recent talk of building more Apollo capsules, if the Russians can't afford to build more Soyuz. A recent American law prevents them from paying for Russian Soyuz.
Soyuz can only return 3. The artical states they could return 6 with two on station.
The station was envisioned with a 7 man crew ultimately but that is with the addiction of the US hab module whose future is very uncertain at this point in time. At this point 2 crew have designed sleeping quaters and one sleep in an empty rack location in the US Lab.
Repairing the shuttle on orbit is almost a hysterical proposition. Each tile is cutom ground for its location. Granted if you knew which tiles needed replacing perhaps you could launch them on a soyuz or shuttle and arrange a towers of hanoi shuffle using the one docking station but then attaching them in space is a major question. You know how painting, gluing etc all have constrainints on tempreture for proper curing ?? The tile setting is similar and you have a vacume of space environment to adhere these tiles on in. I doubt the current methods used are practicible in space. perhaps there is a work around.
This whole idea of of using sation as a life raft for 10 people is somewhat absurd as well unless it was explicitly planned for. The life support systems on station are currently designed for sustained occupation by 3 people. The US hab module would add an extended capacity. Shuttles systems are designed for short periods of use, not sustained suport. Those systems might be maxed to a month... perhaps more if you planned it from the outset.
The problem is people consume and the system is not a closed loop. consumption has to be accounted for in the upmass. If station is equiped to handle three people for 3 months without resuply that slips to 1.5 months with 6 people and to 1 month with 9 and under a month with 10. It can be stretched of course but only so much.
Lastly the shuttle mission has to be designed to go to station to get to station. Shuttles typical ( most efficient ) orbit does not allow for a station rendezvous. I kind of question why shuttle would go anywhere else but with columbia that is an easy answer... being the first orbiter its strcture was significantly heavier than its sister ships and the extra boost needed to get to ISS orbit shrunk its effective payload to that orbit to a very marginal point. They were in fact considering retiring columbia a year or so ago due to this shortcoming.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
the first shuttle to go into space was the Columbia (R.I.P.) and she has been in active operation for the past 22 years.. in fact she was older than many /.ers.
lets face it folks, Columbia and her sisters were NEVER supposed to be in operation for this long.. iirc AIRLINES aren't allowed to fly planes which are more than 25 yrs old (i may be wrong on this one).. and the shuttle goes through MUCH more stress in reentry than your regular airliner.
the shuttles use outmoded technology and are designed for missions that are in many ways different from what they have to do now. should seven lives be risked just to get some satellites into space? or to get some supplies to the ISS? i would say the answer is no.. the US needs to get its priorities straight. start using rockets to get hardware into space, and then use the jettisoned hardware as part of the ISS, use a space equivalent of a delivery truck (pilot, copilot, navigator/arm controller ONLY, and lots of cargo space) for the kind of mission that absolutely HAS to have a human to handle the cargo and use a "space RV" which is what the shuttle was, to conduct some of the missions the shuttle did.. but i believe that once the ISS *REALLY* gets going a lot of those experiments that they were doing on the shuttle could be done just as easily on the ISS labs, with just the experiment components being brought to them via the "delivery truck" or by rocket.
lets face it folks, the shuttle as we know it is not the right tool for the job. so how about we put them out to pasture, and use the lessons they taught us to build a proper spacefleet?
oh i remember why now.. PORK..
ah well... forget it then
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I agree.
I think Saddam is an evil person and we should get rid of him, but I think space exploration exceeds Iraq as a national priority.
Our military budget is going to be 500 billion dollars a year by 2006. I would rather see 300 billion, 6 aircraft carriers, and SSTOs. If anyone attacks us, we will just drop an asteroid on them, or aim a solar mirror at their country and burn up all their food.
Plus if we found a rock with plenty of palladium on it, well, that would be worth the expense of bringing it back - when you figure the environmental destruction of palladium mining and that there is --only one-- source.
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