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Shuttle Politics
TheLoneCabbage writes "Texas Rep. Joe Barton has been quoted today in an AP article saying that he is in favor of grounding the remaining fleet of shuttles. 'If we have to stop manned spaceflight for five or 10 years, then so be it.' The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in every 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable. According to OpenSecrets.org this may have more to do with Joe's friends than how much attention he paid to his math teachers." There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.
The odds may be against the astro/cosmonauts when they go on their missions, but how is this much different when European explorers went out onto the Atlantic? There were many lives lost as well.
Exploration has always been a risky business. I don't believe for a second that the ladies and gentlemen who volunteer for a space mission are not aware of the risks associates with it.
Wearing pants should always be optional.
Just wondering, what do people here feel is an acceptable risk?
/. writeup, is this just another DC windbag looking to make some cash for his cronies?
I would easily say that 1/62.5 is acceptable. In fact, I'm quite impressed that it's not 1/2. It's a really amazing accomplishment to do it at all. Back in the early days (even well into the Apollo program) it was pretty much given that this is a major risk to the lives of the astronauts.
Could it possibly be that we've just gotten soft, and started to take space flight for granted (which would be good in it's own way)? Is it just that the fucking baby-boomers have no spine? If so, will this only get worse in time? For example, I just heard on Howard Stern this morning that the average person doesn't really consider someone an adult until around 26 years old. Are we just becoming less and less responsible and, consequently, less willing to accept the consequences of our actions (including death)?
Or, as stated in the
In any case, 2 crashes in 20 years is a very very good record. You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well. Sure, the people on board the shuttle are worth more than those aboard commercial flights and the shuttle is worth more than a plane... still, it's quite impressive.
Down with Saudi Arabia!!!
"The fine gentleman from Texas displays his outstanding grasp of statistics and engineering stating that 1 failure in ever 62.5 flights is NOT acceptable." I don't think there's any need to call him stupid just because you disagree with him. That is, the fact that he thinks 1 / 62.5 is too big does NOT mean he thinks that it's not small.. it just means he either places less value on space exploration or more value on human safety than you do. 1 death per 62.5 roller coaster riders is much too high... I'm not sure where I stand on space exploration right now myself - I think it's very interesting, and there is certainly the possibility of it being essential to our survival as a race - but the fact is that people are dying and whenever that happens we have to consider our priorities in terms that cannot, perhaps, be described with things you learn in high school math.
Columbia and Challenger were not destroyed because of an O-ring or a piece of foam... they were destroyed because NASA as an organization failed [astron.berkeley.edu]. We need to fix NASA before we continue to launch shuttles... which have become glorified construction and grocery delivery vehicles as opposed to exploratory or R&D craft.
There is obviously not a shortage of astronaughts wanting to go up in the space shuttle. It is not like we are strapping space monkies into the shuttle and sending them up against their will. These are smart educated people, who train hard to be astronaughts and are willing to give their lives to go into space and be pioneers. If they choose this risky business then so be it, I applaud them.
I'm not saying there is no room for improvement in the shuttle program, but some bozo politician from Texas should keep his word hole shut, when it comes to issues like this. When people are probing the frontiers some are bound to die. He should look at the history of the state he represents, it was not a bunch of sissy frontiersmen who wanted to stable the exploration and charting of Texas.
I'm sure it's completely unrelated to the cost of putting 7 astronauts in space vs the cost of putting 7 troops in a foreign country
Face it, the US population doesn't care about soldiers lives.
If you die, in service, your family might get enough for a funeral.
If you happen to be in an office building that is the target of a high profile attack (Sept 11) your family will get millions.
It's sickening.
But how is it that we have had troops (US gov. employees) all over the world doing the most dangerous things for decades but 7 astronauts are unreasonable losses?
Without trying to trivialise death, it must be said that this is a brilliant point. Soldiers, people with the dual purpose - at least from a government standpoint - of killing and being killed. The U.S. has just come out of a war in which at least 79 American soliders were killed. Yet, a politician has the balls to stand up and say what seems to be, "It's okay to die for your country, just make sure there's a gun in your hand."
A truly disgusting man, with little more in mind than the lining of his own pockets.
But how is it that we have had troops (US gov. employees) all over the world doing the most dangerous things for decades but 7 astronauts are unreasonable losses?
An excellent point. The answer is I guess, some people are more important than others. It's like when a pretty white schoolgirl gets kidnapped, it's frontpage news and the country is in shock. But if the same thing happens to a coloured guy, then nobody gives a damn. Or when you read how successful the war with Iraq was because there were only 200 fatalities, and you realise that they're just counting the Americans.
Every one of those astronauts that died understood the risks. They understood the engineering behind the shuttle, and knew full well that they could pay for the experience or chance of being in space with their lives. Last time I checked, NASA was an all-volunteer organization where people fought like hell to get accepted into the astronaut ranks. Those 14 people volunteered, and not a one of them would want his or her memory reflected by the cancellation of something they spent their entire lives to achieve. (with the exception of McAuliffe, but I don't think she'd want it cancelled either)
We shouldn't remember them as some goddamn statistical casualties, we should remember them as people so dedicated to the cause of human space exploration that they willingly laid down their lives for the furtherance of human knowledge. This guy's statements bring those 14 brave people down to the level of a goddamn statistic, and I hope
Keep the shuttles flying as long as there are volunteers to crew them, and make every effort to bring them home. We have the technology now, we had it in the 1970's, all we need is the national will to do it right.
My own pointless vanity vintage computing page
Plus there will probably be a few private companies doing the same thing over the next decade or two.
You're doing a risk-benefit analysis without looking at the benefit side. The risk to the astronauts would be acceptable if there were actual science being accomplished. I am not one of those profiteers who disdains "pure science," but any reasonable assessment of the shuttle program's scientific accomplishments has to conclude that sending old people into space and observing spiderwebs in zero gravity is not worth the tremendous cost in money and lives.
If we did away with the shuttle program (which over the years has turned into a huge pork barrel for the shuttle contractors), we could replace it with many more cheap unmanned flights plus manned flights with focused objectives. There's no reason to send an astronaut into space, at huge expense, to perform experiments that could just as easily be done on an unmanned craft. Instead, we should be sending those astronauts to Mars, which will never happen through the shuttle program.
Those that go up aren't doing so blindly. They've made their choice as to the relative value of their lives to themselves without going versus the value to themselves of going. We should honor that choice by being proud of them for being braver than most, not by denying the choice to others.
If someone were to come up with a plan for a one way trip to Mars that offered even a glimmer of hope for surviving, you'd have no trouble finding people who would rather live a few months on Mars than the rest of their lives on Earth. Time by itself isn't a reason to live.
Maybe we could start a group of citizens and buy our congressmen back?
Everytime we buy a Disney product, we help Disney buy our congressman. Remeber that the next time you buy "Snow white and the seven dwarves" on DVD.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
Space exploration is why we send 7 people up there on a regular basis. We don't understand what's up there, we want to find out.
Unfortunately, one of the things we don't have a handle on is how to do it safely. That's part of the exploration process. We obviously have a system that works, as we've returned many safely back to earth. In the case of Columbia, an unknown variable was introduced. We've never known what happens if a tile is struck with an object on liftoff. It's never happened before, and we had to react with information we knew to figure out if it was a problem. Sometimes the only way to learn is to find out.
As for the 7 astronauts, this mission was hailed as one of the most successful in space history. The amount of research that was performed and the data was collected surpassed any previous missions. The astronauts love their work, so much in fact that they're willing to risk everything for it. For 7 people to sacrifice themselves for their research is truly an honor, and the world should see these 7 people as heros, not casualties.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
If loss of life really we're the reason, the following things would also be outlawed / shut-down:
Driving
Helicopters
Airlines
Military
Sex for those over 40
Smoking
Drinking
High School (Columbine)
What a crock. This whole thing is politically motivated.
So what, we had an accident and lost an expensive vehicle and some highly trained personnel. I don't want to sound harsh, but we lose highly trained military personnel in helicopter accidents monthly (and usually more than 7 personnel), why not shut down all of that model of chopper?
Just stop fighting already and build a space elevator.
BA
For example, the famous protein crystals were no better than earth-grown ones, and the flu drug came from an Australian crystal, not a Space Lab 1 crystal.. Other than spiders in zero G, very little research has been done on the ISS (International Space Station), and none of it needed human minders.
For example, we could float about 10 more space telescopes for the cost of the ISS. And in fact, NASA repeatedly transferred money out of research to cover ISS cost overruns.
Don't get me wrong, the shuttles and the space station are great for inspiring school kids, but they really soak up $billions that could go to research.
As for shooting down Dinosaur Killers, what Bruce Willis movie have you been watching? An unmanned rocket that can send a robot to Mars can deliver a warhead to an incoming asteroid, and several ground based radars and space based telescopes can scan the skies much better than an astronaut looking out the ISS window!
--- Often in error; never in doubt!
There's also very little 'experimentation' going compared to physics, biology, sociology.
Most of what CS people do is experimentation, if not all.
True, we don't often use the scientific method in the same manner, but that's because our work has more practical applications than research applications, so you don't see much algorithm research since they'd rather have us spitting out games and OSs.
Everytime I compile, it's an experiment. I have variables and consequences, and I have to draw a conclusion every time and base my next actions off of that.
We use mathematics to create our experiments, but say, there is no equation for Internet Explorer. It gets to complex to map out an entire program of serious magnitude.
So I think we're very much scientists, ableit untraditional.
But that's just my biased viewpoint.
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
Well Soyuz has two problems:
1. Russia doesn't have enough money to build lot of them.
2. US is unwilling to buy Soyuz spacecrafts from Russia.
First, one could question how reasonable or unreasonable the size of the US military is. (Or one should be able to; these days even a hint that we should adjust the forcepool brings with it the accusation that you are a traitor.) Second, for me it's not the loss of the astronoauts' lives per se that makes the manned space program unreasonable. As you mention, the risks are concrete, obvious, and difficult to explain away, but people volunteer. The unreasonable loss is the loss of funding and opportunity to do better science, even space science, in the US. The expenditure of cash on the problem of how to keep a manned space program going when every launch makes you cringe with its "make-work" and PR mission content is just scandalous. People who think that *this* kind of thing will help us fight off near-earth asteroids or bring us closer to lunar colonization are really and truly just not thinking very critically. I would go so far as to argue that the people who are most interested in the eventual manned exploration of space should be the people who should be *least* interested in supporting the status quo.
Babar
1. The fact that we humans can do it.
Don't need 2 & 3 after that.
I agree, but NASA is absolutely NOT the right group to do this. NASA is a bureaucracy, an organization that is first and foremost a political organization. As such, it rewards political ability, NOT efficiency, and NOT forming a workable plan.
I mean, how many of its primary design goals did the shuttle meet? Almost none: it wasn't reusable enough, didn't lower launch costs, never flew nearly enough. Tell me, who got fired?
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
While one can quibble with the arithmatic, I don't think there's any getting away from the fact that 1 in 56.5 is a horrendous statistic for failure, particularly for a program with a mission cost of $640 million in current dollars.
The story was, with all this expense (though NASA has been lying about the program expense from the very beginning, claiming it would be less expensive per mission than single-use rockets), you would be able to increase reliability and safety.
It hasn't turned out that way. The Russian Soyuz single-use rocket, for example, has a far higher safety rating (no accidents on manned flights since 1971), and costs about 30 TIMES LESS per flight.
There's something obviously wrong here, and you don't have to be an opponent of the space program to see it.
And I'm very much a proponent of the space program as a whole, and want to see a concerted effort towards a mission to Mars. But I don't see how the Shuttle program gets us there. It's a boondoggle only justifiable with really really bad math (read NASA math).
Thus, the biggest reason to be opposed to the Shuttle program: It's astronomic expense crowds out money for any meaningful space exploration.
Even if it means a five to ten years hiatus in the manned space program (though Russian launch vehicles could still be used), I'm all for using the money to build a manned space program that actually makes sense.
More people die from the mistakes of politicians in one year than NASA could kill in the next 30 years of space exploration.
That's just it. These people volunteer. We aren't /ordering/ them to do this. They aren't conscripted. They volunteer to do it. Nobody lies to them about the risk. Hell, you /can't/ lie to them about the risk, it's all right there in our history.
Why should we tell people they can't if they're willing to take on the risk? I would be willing to bet that this is more motivated by the cost of replacing shuttles and crew than it is the potential loss of life. Cynical yes, but sadly enough, probalby true.
"No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare."
--James Madison
And the odds caught up because the shuttle carries double the crew that any previous craft carried. Each shuttle has killed 2 1/3 times as many people as the only Apollo accident. What kind of ruckus are we gonna raise when the first 50 passenger spaceliner disintegrates on reentry?
I'm very against this whole "risk averse" attitude America is so involved in. Risk is good, risk drives us to make things safer, but smartly, without emotion and without pandering by political puppets. Negligence on the other hand, is not a good thing, and it seems that NASA was very negligent in fixing this problem that they've known about for a while.
I don't think the major issue people are going to have is that Shuttles are crashing and burning. What they are going to have a problem with is NASA lying and cheating, and putting lives at risk, those in space, and those on the ground. It's kind of like the Enron scandal all over again. Shitloads of media bluster, lots of politicians yammering and jabbering their flip-top heads, and in the end, NOTHING GETS DONE. Status quo.
God I love this country.
Hate to say it, but I have to agree with Rep. Barton. Manned space flight, as it is currently practiced, is a joke, and has been since the seventies. The Space Age has apparently come and gone....there are children today whose parents were not even alive at the time of the last moon landing. Having once stepped on another world, we now seem to be content to simply play in our cosmic back yard.
All our manned space activity has been devoted to a bloated hulking monstrosity of a vehicle that can manage far fewer missions at far higher cost than originally intended; for twenty years, until the ISS was finally built, it failed to serve the function it was designed for--ferrying equipment, construction materials, etc. into space. (And the value of the ISS is as dubious sa that of the shuttle itself.) We send it up two hundred miles, it circles around the earth a few dozen times, and it comes back down. If it doesn't blow up on the way up or burn up on reentry. The shuttle program has obstructed cheaper, more efficient, and more powerful ways of getting people into space. It has so hindered us that it would take us another ten years to rebuild the infrastructure needed to send us back to the moon.
And for what? For PR? So schoolkids could have a real live astronaut growing their bean sprouts for them? So John Glenn could have one last moment of glory? The only worthwhile missions in my opinion have been those to service the Hubble telescope. Consider the adverse impact it has had on other, more valuable, unmanned programs, either because of the shuttle's drain on NASA's budget, or its inability to function due to delays and disasters--the delay of the Cassini program, the bare-bones funding available for Mars missions, the shame of being the only spacefaring nation unable to send a probe to Halley's Comet on its last visit, the failure to send a probe to Pluto when it would be most scientifically useful...
The shuttle program is a parasite on the nation's science program, and it is a killer. Don't look at it as a 2% failure rate--two disasters out of 107 flights. It's a 40% failure rate: two of five vehicles catastrophically exploding, well within the limits of their expected usable life.
I am by no means saying that we should end the space program. The Voyager program, the Hubble and Chandra telescopes, and other unmanned scientific missions have provided us with vast knowledge about the universe around us. The commercial space program has enriched our lives here on earth, through global communications networks, better weather forecasting, etc. But compared to these, our manned space program is lagging far behind. We can send people no farther than low earth orbit, and we have no worthwhile vision for what they should do once they get there.
The Challenger exploded on STS-51L. The subsequent investigation predicted catastrophic failure, on average, every 58 flights (IIRC). Current stats show about the same rate.
It sounds to me like Rep. Barton is on the money concerning shuttle reliability.
People who disagree with you are not automatically evil, greedy, or stupid.
Frankly I agree with him on one point. The STS program needs to be replaced. The Shuttle is an aging piece of antiquated hardware that is probally getting to the end of it's lifespan.
However
I do not believe that we have to send the rest of the Shuttles to the Graveyard just yet.
The two shuttles lost are so far, the first that actually made it into space (Enterprise being little more than a test platform) and the Challenger which (if memory serves and if I'm wrong I do apologize) is the second oldest orbiter.
Secondly, It's Space we're dealing with. It's an unknown and we're trying to learn how to get into space without killing ourselves. If you think about all the manned spaceflights that we have done as the world as a whole, mankind has a pretty damn good track record.
I agree that the Shuttle needs to go, but with a little care, it CAN still serve it's purpose until the replacement is designed, tested and ready. Give the remaining Shuttles a once over, fix the problem and get them back up.
Phoenix
-- Wiccan Army, 13th Airborne Division "We will not fly silently into the night"
All precision issues aside, everything mentioned assumes the shuttle (pick any shuttle) is a constant. It's not. The fleet is showing wear and tear, which really shouldn't be a surprise to any rational person. Some parts are replaced, some are never replaced. How about factoring in some sort of decay here?
I really don't understand why the /. crowd should dislike this proposal.
If I had my 'druthers, I'd scrap the Shuttle operations budget entirely, put all of them into museums, and spend the operations budget entirely on serious R&D for purpose-built reusable spacecraft.
We need:
1) A reusable, unmanned heavy lifter like Venturestar (possibly with an option to load a cargo module that would essentially be a cockpit/life support system, for getting people into orbits higher than LEO).
2) A passenger ferry to get us to the ISS. This needs to be neither large nor capable of carrying much cargo, just people.
3) A craft built in orbit that would be able to get us to Mars. We could ferry parts up there with the aforementioned heavy lifter, and ferry people there with the passenger ferry.
Does this not make sense?
+++ATH0
Today's neoconservatives often disparage the shuttle as high-tech socialism, and I've talked to more than a few different people who regard the whole program as a tax-and-spend legacy of an earlier governmental style. (Low-cost probes like Pathfinder and so on are their usual ideal.) Just goes to show you, the world's not black and white.
Mondale would be practically a liberal dinosaur by today's standards, and generally speaking he was arguing for funding social programs above NASA -- but his objections to cost estimates for this program seem to have been basically right, don't they? You have to respect that. Nixon's got a conservative's rep, but he was a Keynesian in economic terms and he definitely committed to a massive spending program here based on bogus estimates. With his eyes wide open about it, too.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
One of the problems with current situation is that craft seem to be designed by committee according to specifications drafted by politicians eager to bring to their districts as much business as possible (and line their own pockets with 'campaign contributions'). Efficiency, cost and (unless people die and it hits the news) safety do not seem to be important.
The rest of this post is mostly about launching satelites, but it probably also applies to manned launches.
Another problem is that of economics. There currently aren't enough launches per year to allow economy of scale to play any role. If, for instance, one were to design, build and launch a particular booster type twice weekly for three years (ca. 300 launches total), the unit cost would be a lot lower than if that same booster type were launched every other month (18 launches or so) or even monthly (36 launches) over the same period. The former case makes an assembly line affordable, the latter would not. The higher schedule would also allow more opportunities to test and phase in new equipment like electronics, pumps and engines.
A (somewhat extreme) example of this can be found in the history of the World War II A4 missile, better known as the V2. At peak production it is estimated that the Mittelwerke produced hundreds of the things, even under wartime conditions. Of those launched, about 80% worked as designed. Without bombing and slave labor and with better materials, quality control and manufacturing methods, mass-building a booster capable of lofting 2 tons or more to low orbit for under $4 million apiece and with a success rate of 95% or better should be quite possible. Since it isn't designed for maximum throw weight (like an ICBM) somewhat cheaper (and heavier) materials can be used to keep costs down. More on the V2's history and its application to modern launches can be found at this location. Cheers, Coward
Can't we at least do better than the Russians?
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I think you'll find they have their own nukes. That's why you can't bully them like you do most of the world. Who disagreed with the US policy on Iraq? France (nukes) China (nukes) Russia (many nukes). Can you see a trend?
That was classic intercourse!
That's why 9/11 will always be a bigger day of infamy than Pearl Harbor - as brutal as Pearl Harbor was, the targets on Dec 7 were clearly military, and they could hardly be classed as a strategic surprise - war was already raging across Europe and Asia, and tension were extreme between the US and Japan.
The terrorists of 9/11, on the other hand, attacked clearly civilian targets, and it surprised the shit out of a lot of Americans that there is actually a group of evil bastards who would kill Americans simply for being Americans.
If I had a 1 in 56.5 chance of winning the lottery jackpot, I'd slap 60 bucks down with no hesitation. Small outlay of money for almost a guarantee of winning.
;)
So.. play Roulette much?
Didn't think so. When did 1:56 become "almost a guarantee?"
Well, if each selection of 6 numbers had a 1 in 56 chance of winning the jackpot and that cost me a dollar, then spending 60 bucks pretty much guarantees that I'll win the jackpot. I could still lose of course, but such a loss would be unlikely.
I assumed people would realize that 1 ticket costs a buck.
if I knew there was a ~2% chance of failure. Turn it around, because it also means there's a ~98% chance of success.
So if I told you there'd be a 2% chance of death everytime you drove your car, you'd drive to work every day? Odds are you'd be dead in under a year. Better take the bus.
If there were a two percent chnce yould die from taking cough syrup, would you tough out a sore throat or take the cough syrup. A plain sore throat is a minor irritation that goes away on its own compared to a small chance of death.
At the other end of the spectrum, if there were a 2% chance of death as a complication to a heart transplant, you'd laugh off the risk because without the heart transplant you're dead anyway.
Odds are about more than just pure percentages. You have to weigh the costs and the benefits.
Or when you read how successful the war with Iraq was because there were only 200 fatalities, and you realise that they're just counting the Americans.
Or when you read how terrible the war with Iraq was because there were a few thousand Iraqi fatalities, and you realise that they're ignoring the many thousands of Iraqis per year that Saddam Hussein killed.
79 casualties? That wasn't a war... that barely qualifies as a bad traffic accident. A nightclub burned down and killed more people than that! That's fewer people than fit on a greyhound bus!
Remember your history books, where fatalties were measured in thousands?
War today is no big deal for the US, we're afraid of loss of life. Our entire society is afraid of death of the idea that we might die. We try to shelter our children from it with euphamisms, we paint death as the worst possible outcome, as something to be feared and hated.
Is it any wonder that a nation so obsessed with itself, so narcissitic, wouldn't want to see death in spectacular form like a shuttle explosion? That's what REALLY shocked our nation about the WTC attacks. It pointed a big finger at every US citizen and said, "You too are mortal!" and we didn't like it.
When we stop pretending death doesn't exist for us maybe we'll learn to live with it and accept that all men die, and everyone deserves the chance to choose the manner of that death.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Fixing these craft to improve those odds of survival is an unending thing. It's like debugging a ten million line software application - you'll never get the last bug. Fixing THIS problem may well be a complete waste of time since it'll probably never happen this way again. Sure, other shuttles will crash if we continue to fly them - but I'd be very suprised if the exact same problem happened again. Hence, it's irrelevent whether you fix this problem or not - even designing an entire new manned space system may not dramatically improve people's odds of surviving a round trip to space.
But so long as the astronauts like those odds, there is no really good reason not to continue to fly the existing shuttle fleet. A 98% chance of survival is OK for quite a lot of people to get a once-in-a-lifetime chance to get into space. If any of them believed the shuttle fleet was anything like 100% safe, that thought must have been dispelled by the first shuttle accident.
A 2% chance of dying is not a good risk for (say) driving to work every day - but for a chance at doing something utterly amazing which you'll only get to do once or twice in an entire career - I don't think you'd find trouble getting volunteers.
Driving your car to work every day for a year gives you a one in 124 chance of dying or being seriously disabled. Driving to work every day of your life is MUCH more risky than taking a round trip to the ISS in a shuttle.
The actual capital cost of the shuttle fleet is significant - but if your only other plan is to ground them permenantly, you might as well fly them to destruction instead - either way, the cost of losing them (in purely monetary terms) is the same.
I'd bet good money that those astronauts who were sitting up in the ISS last week would have preferred to risk coming home in an un-fixed shuttle than coming home in that ratty old russian ship (which incidentally came close to killing them all as it was).
www.sjbaker.org
No - it doesn't prove that at all. He's a Texas politician - and the SSC was built in Waxahachi Texas. (I live just a few miles from the large *semi*-circular hole in the ground that is the remains of that project. Do you still wanna bet that he had no vested interests in the project?
www.sjbaker.org
1) There were no suborbital shuttle tests.
2) The test flight shuttle was Enterprise.
3) The shuttle is 1970's technology.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
What's amazing is not that a Senator can be bought, but rather how inexpensive it is.
$13,800 contribution from Lockheed Martin?
At that rate, the Slashdot crowd could own all of the Senate and Congress and still have money left over to buy a burger.
Why are we screwing around with the DMCA and RIAA all the time? Just buy your own congresscritter. Take two, they're cheap.
I assumed people would realize that 1 ticket costs a buck.
You better check your math before playing the lottery. :) You have a 1 in 56.5 chance of winning for each dollar played, so you have a 55.5 in 56.5 chance of losing. The odds of you losing 60 times is (55.5/56.5)^60=34%. Hardly guaranteed. In order to be 'almost guaranteed'[have better than a 99.5% chance] you would have to bet roughly $297.
The way you've phrased your argument you're letting the "upper class" (different from the wealthy, as there are wealthy people who aren't bastards) succeed in their perpetual goal of setting the impoverished lower classes against each other.
:).
In your kidnapping example, in the US the real dividing line is not white vs. colored as it is about rich vs. poor, or more correctly powerful vs. powerless. This is easy to confuse, because there happens to be strong correlations between race and income (for at least partially historical reasons). The fact is that poor white people have more in common with poor black people than they do with wealthy/powerful whites - a fact that the many wealthy whites (the afore mentioned "upper class") want to hide, conciously or unconciously. Why? Because setting the poorest people against each other keeps them from realizing how bad their situation is and demanding better.
I've simplified this argument greatly because I'm at work and don't want to take an hour or more off to give this topic the nuanced argument it deserves. I like my employers, they're good folks
khayyam
I believe the apollo astronauts knew that there was a significant risk of catastrophic failure. I am sure everybody around them knew of these risks as well. I remember a TV interview of one manager who was in mission control at the time of the first landing, talking about the master computer overload alarms that kept popping up as they were landing. He said he had estimated beforehand that it was 50-50 as to whether or not they would acutally be able to complete the mission. Apollo 13 came hairline close to catastrophic failure.
I remember seeing a film clip of a man testing a prototype parachute off the eiffel tower in 1900. His prototype chute didn't open, and the unfortunate man met his end at the base of the tower. Fortunately, this didn't dissuade others from repeating his tragic experiment.
We all have to go sometime, might as well make it for a meaningful cause.
My rights don't need management.
What's an acceptable failure rate? I mean, going into space is dangerous stuff. Driving a car is pretty dangerous. Do the math. I mean, granted, driving isn't AS dangerous as going into space, but a lot more drivers die each year than astronauts, that's for sure.
Hell, fighter pilots and helicopter pilots in the military die all the time in accidents in peace time. I mean, not every day, but it happens a few times a year, it seems. Should we stop letting pilots fly military jets and helicopters?
I mean hey, let's not get involved in any more wars because 1 loss in 10 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable. Let's not have people work in steel mills anymore because 1 death in 1000 (or whatever) is NOT acceptable.
People die doing dangerous things. Astronauts aren't ignorant of the dangers. They know them better than any of us will ever know, and yet they choose to do it. Hell, if I had the opportunity, I'd do it. I don't consider myself brave or foolhardy. I simly consider the value of the program to far outweigh the few lives that have been lost to it.
As far as I'm concerned the only politicians that are qualified to decide if the shuttles should be grounded, are former astronauts. Unfortunately, I don't think we have any former astronauts in congress anymore.
1:62.5 ratio? Hardly...
The maintenance and dynamics of each shuttle launch can NOT be summed up in a simple ratio. This is implying that there is some magic force behind the shuttle disasters... which there is not.
Spewing ratios and saying that this correlation will hold in the future is a horrible excuse. The way to solve the problem is not to just ground the fleet... their magic ratio would still remain. The proper course of action would be to raise funding (instead of the cuts that the government likes to put upon NASA) for their shuttle fleet so they can better find, diagnose, and fix the potential problems and design safety procedures in the event that the unthinkable DOES happen...
Why does this senator want to ground the fleet? Perhaps money?? hmm... well NASA WAS working on the Venture Star a while back... but they had to scrub it since they didn't have enough funding to continue the project to make a safer and more efficient reusable launch vehicle.
The astronauts know what they're getting into, the engineers know the risks, the entire organization knows how dangerous this is... so why are we going to groud the shuttles so they can't make further scientific experiments and tests that would help improve the safety of each launch?
If people had this mentality when the idea of launching people into space first became reality, man would never have left the ground...
So where is the private sector replacement for Shuttle?
Closer nearby timewise than the NASA replacement for shuttle, unless they just unmothball and retrofit one of their old Big Dumb Booster designs.
What NASA doesn't have is a space program. It has (or had, in its heyday) brute force backed by implausibly huge resources.
It's like doing architecture using a bazillion slaves, log-rolled sleds, and earth ramps. It works, but it's not really a technology. There's little you can learn from it if you actually want to up the deployment scale, drop the price, or achieve repeatable results with reusable tools.
What the new private space companies are doing, in this analogy, is more like the invention of bricks and mortar. It won't do anywhere near as much yet, but it's the right way forward.
Rip out all the life support systems and it will make a great space truck, then build a ligher, safer, more modern space plane to get the people there and back in one piece.
When you have to keep applying band-aid after band-aid to a system to get it to work, and it comes nowhere near fulfilling its original goals, it is time to go back to the drawing board. Stop wasting effort trying to patch up a bad design.
For its time, and even for now, the Space Shuttle is a fairly good design. Perfect, it isn't, but within the limits of materials available and propulsion systems based on chemical reactions, it's not bad.
The safety of any spacecraft is dominated by the propulsion system (the same is true of terrestrial aircraft). What has changed since 1975? Unfortunately, not much. The most recent innovation in large-scale rocket engines, Rocketdyne's RS-68, can provide more thrust than the SSME (Space Shuttle Main Engine), but was designed as a single-use engine on expendable boosters. It might be adapted, perhaps, to be used on a manned vehicle, but improving the SSMEs would cost less and they perform adequately.
If you were to design a functional replacement for the shuttle, you might be surprised to discover that it looks a lot like... The Shuttle...
Some things might be different. You might consider designing liquid-fueled flyback boosters to replace the SRBs. You might eliminate the toxic propellants used in the reaction jets and the APU to ease servicing the orbiter. You might eliminate the external tank, enlarge the orbiter and eliminate the cost of replacing the tank. You might even find something better than RCC and silica tiles for thermal protection.
But any new vehicle would probably be remarkably similar to what we already have if it accomplishes the same mission. The Russians, themselves not fools, virtually copied the Shuttle in their Buran vehicle. Do you suppose there might be some reason for this ?
The fundamental design decisions and engineering trade-offs that resulted in the shuttle design have not been changed by new technology. So long as that remains the case, and requirements placed on the designers remain unchanged, new vehicles will not be much different.
I hope John Carmack, Burt Rutan, XCOR and the others are successful. But their immediate goals are far less lofty than those placed before the designers of the Shuttle.
Is a new vehicle needed ? Absolutely. Hundreds of them. But not one will perform the task the Shuttle has done for the last twenty years. And more than a few will crash, explode, and otherwise fail, taking their crews and passengers with them. And there will be calls from the news media, caterwauling on /., and the banshee cries of plaintiff's attorneys demanding payment for the after-the-fact ineptitude of everyone involved. How is this different from loss of the crew of Columbia?
The Shuttle has many limitations, but if the task was easy, it would have been repeated and improved upon long ago.
An intersting perspective. Let's see if it's backed up by fact. Here are the numbers I get from the U.S. state department. You can find the report here. These numbers seem to be in pretty good agreement with what I've seen from other sites on the web (you can do your own googling to verify).
U.S. Spending on Foreign Operations 2002: $17.9 Billion
Requested spending in 2003: $16.4 Billion
Requested spending in 2004: $18.8 Billion
Just so you know - those aid figures include a little over $4 billion a year in foreign military financing and a couple hundred million each for anti-drug efforts and peacekeeping efforts. But, to give you the benefit of the doubt, we'll lump it all in as "foreign aid."
In FY 2004, NASA's proposed budget is $15.4 Billion ( link).
Cost of the ISS (estimated, from Young Report): ~$30 billion (link)
Estimated costs of "other" domestic problems:
Medicare prescription drug benefit for elderly: $11-15 Billion (link).
Domestic port security needs: $2 billion (link).
Upgrade school technology: $100 billion (link).
I could go on, but I don't see much point in doing so. Foreign aid is a teeny tiny part of the federal budget, and cutting it won't do much of anything. A vast proportion of federal discretionary spending comes from Defense - if you want to cut, that's where you've got to cut.
scripsit Interrobang:
Lots of things operate with far lower failure rates than two percent -- my car, for instance. If there were a two percent chance of catastrophic failure every time I put my car on the freeway, I would be dead many times over.
In principio creauit Linus Linucem.