Slashdot Mirror
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
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
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"
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.
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!
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.
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
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 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.
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.