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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.
Fine. Now does he have a good idea for what to do when the next dinosaur killer comes along? The longer the human race is confined to this planet, the less likely it is we're going to survive as a species.
Of course, helping delay extinction won't put money in his pocket, so I suppose that's a lost cause...
End of lesson. You may press the button.
He has some good points. We do need to replace the shuttle. But, his campaign contribution lists kind of outline the whole "conflicting interests" problem that he has here.
We already have a Senator Disney, might as well have a Senator Lockheed-Martin.
Maybe we could start a group of citizens and buy our congressmen back?
Disclaimer: I am not trolling.
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? They knew what they were getting into, I assure you, just like any soldier. Thousands have given their lives for science and would gladly do so again. These scientists/adventurers/gov. employees were willing to die for the embetterment of the human race - why should cowards decide where the brave may go?
if the problem is kids being horrified at school watching the space shuttle then put the feed on delay.
---- The real Slashdot is still here. You just have to browse at -1 to read the comments.
From this link:
"Barton's moment in the sun, up until late last year, was his advocacy of the Superconducting Super Collider (SSC)."
So, apparently, this guy's not all bad...(although, apparently, that was politically motivated as well...)
Suicide Booth: You are now dead! Thank you for using Stop and Drop, America's favorite since 2008.
Or, more accurately, NASA-controlled development of manned space flight.
Given the huge amount of private-sector activity in the suborbital market currently, and NASA's pitiful track record in developing new launch vehicles, it's not at all unlikely that simply getting NASA out of the way will yield an economically feasable set of replacement vehicles in a shorter time frame for less money.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
The Russian Soyuz spacecraft has made 1500 successful launches in a life of over 30 years. Several hundred of those have been manned, with only one catastrophe.
Unlike the Shuttle, the Soyuz is not a reusable craft. The Shuttle was designed to be reusable to cut down on the cost of manned spaceflight - the irony being that the cost of the two lost Shuttles is greater than all the money spent on Soyuz craft so far.
More information here.
Let's put this in perspective. If one out of 62.5 airplanes crashed, that would be, what, about two plane crashes per major airport per day?
Yes, this is a real problem.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
Given that Joe Barton represents the state of Texas, home of NASA, this is a major surprise.
Most Texans (and especially Houstonians) take extreme pride in the space programme. You only have to look at the name of Houston's NBA and MLB franchises - the Rockets and the Astros - to see how synonymous the words "Houston" and "space" have become. ("Houston" was even the first word spoken on the moon.)
But lets look at the rationale behind this "frank" admission.
The longer the shuttle fleet is grounded, the more likely it is that the fleet will be put through a series of expensive upgrades and overhauls. Furthermore, the more likely it is that serious amounts of money will be spent on looking at the next generation of NASA manned orbiters. (There's no way that George W. Bush, the former Governor of Texas, will want to go down in history as the President that mothballed NASA and destroyed a national symbol of pride - that's not the way he wants to be remembered.)
And just who'll benefit from all that extra money pouring into space research? Why, astronautical and aeronautical engineering companies, oil, power and chemical firms, big and small, especially those that are based in (yes, you guessed it) Texas.
Is grounding the shuttle fleet for the next ten years a good idea? Well, I don't have all the facts but the failure rate does suggest that the programme does need to be more closely examined.
Is a new orbiter the best way forward? Again, I'm not on the NASA payroll so I'm not the most informed individual but I'd argue that we need a reusable platform for getting to and from the International Space Station now, and a more modern, flexible and efficient replacement ASAP.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
But he might have a point for discussion anyway. I think its a bit foolish to talk about excessive risk when you basically strap yourself to several thousand tons of explosives, if the astrounauts are prepared to do it then I salute their courage.
I think of more prevalence is whether the shuttle is value for money. Its main reson for current existence seems to be the ISS which is turning into a money pit of epic proportions which now we cannot afford to abandon, thus ironically safeguarding the shuttle. I was staggered to read how cheaply John Carmack at all were planning to achieve sub orbital flights. Not a particularly balanced comparrison I agree but I would be in favour of NASA and the other spaces agencies for that matter investing a bit of time and effort with these independent efforts to develop more innovative and hope fully cheaper solutions.
Also if they could do it ASAP please because I really want to take a space flight before I am consigned to the great NULL.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
'Commercial Fishing' is actually the world's most dangerous job, closely followed by 'Timber Cutters and Loggers'.
Being a Soldier, Fireman, or Astronaut is not even in the Top 10.
Airline Pilots and Railroad Signal Operators are in there though.
Astronauts have a lot more in the way of glory and probably money than fishermen too.
You ask people who Neil Armstrong was. I bet a lot more people know that than know who Neil Kinnock was.
source
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Let's look at basic facts of manned American flights to date.
Project Mercury: 6 flights, no deaths.
Project Gemini: 12 flights, no deaths, 1 abort.
Project Apollo: 18 flights (including Apollo-Soyuz). 3 fatalities (non-launch-related), 1 abort (in-flight, no injuries)
Project Skylab: 3 flights, no aborts.
So, by the end of 1975, Americans have flown into space only 39 times. Thirty-nine. Barely enough to tempt fate, it seems.
Space Transportation System: 113 missions, 14 fatalities (in-flight).
Everyone knows that spaceflight is still very dangerous. In the case of a Shuttle, the odds just caught up. That's not a failure.
In the Challenger disaster, NASA and its contractors failed, as they did with Apollo 1, to use their imagination properly to see the real numbers as real chances for catastrophe.
In the Columbia accident, NASA didn't go the extra mile in determining damage on the orbiter, but all other decision making appeared on-target, IMHO. Not that there were many options that they could have presented to the astronauts to save orbiter and crew.
The main problem with the Shuttle right now is to protect the critical tiles. Ice will always form on the orbiter's ET and all flights have returned with some ding damage from ice. Foam falling from the ET was obviously too much damage for Columbia to withstand.
I propose an aeroshell that fits under the orbiter body where it mounts to the ET. It would be integral to the ET, and cover the RCC and underbody of the orbiter, including part of the nose. The only change in flight that would be required is for the orbiter or the ET to be given thrusters that push the ET forward (or orbiter to aft) to clear the aeroshell that covers the leading edges and nose.
That, and perhaps we can rig a harness where we can place inept Congressmen under the STS exhaust to show them how things really work.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
--I don't want them grounded, but I would like to see them all used for one more trip up, then left up there. Turn them into the first step of having a shuttle fleet between LOE and the moon and mars. It's the take off and landing to earth that beats on them bad, but they are fine once in orbit. They could be additions to the space stations, perhaps the cargo bays retrofitted before last launch to additional fuel tanks and better crew cabin areas, purposes like that. No need to waste them, just use them more efficiently. On the ground they would just be stupid tourist traps, up in space, still dang useful. I see little reason a shuttle couldn't have smaller boosters installed and a larger fuel tank filled once in orbit, then used for manned missions to mars and whatnot. It's that HUGE fuel cost to escape earth and reach orbit that is expensive and dangerous, so WHY keep doing that over and over and over again? A fraction of that fuel used once leaving from orbit would take you to mars. Launch them up there ONCE, then it's UP there and we got us "space rockets" then. We're reinventing the wheel every time we launch and re land one. OK idea when first proposed, now time to move on. I see it just exactly like they have done with B-52's, they have thought of so many uses for them that go beyond their original missions and specs. Let's just do some more creative modding with what we got and paid for already instead of throwing them away or continual beating on them.
I've thought this for more than a decade now, seems a duh to me.
Dumb rockets can carry cargo and occasional passengers up better, and we can land passengers better too, our old "splashdown" into the water worked quite well..
Ok, so if the true destruction odds are 1:56.5, that means that over time, 1 out of every 56.5 flights the shuttle will be destroyed. That's a 1.7% chance of catastrophic failure. Because as we've seen, there are no survivors. Those actually seem a little high. What are the odds of other methods of space travel?
Odds must be taken in context and with the benefits and outcomes weighed against each other.
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.
If I were told that my child had a 1 in 56.5 chance of getting a fatal genetic disease, I'd certainly think twice before have a child, and I'd definitely have any possible screening tests done.
In *your* opinion, the risk of death to people you don't know (probably) is low enough to justify letting them volunteer for a mission. Their spouses may think an almost 2% chance of death is far too high.
Regardless of the political motivation behind it, an examination does need to be made, and the risks adequately explored.
As a comparison approximately 129 soldiers have died in Iraq out of approximately 150,000. I had trouble getting an exact figure, but I think that's a conservative estimate of troop numbers and the 129 is an official DoD number from a couple of weeks ago. One place said there 110,000 troops around the Quwait border alone. So the chancces of getting killed in this latest ware were 1:1162. Pretty slim.
That's an incredibly specious arguement--if space travel scaled to the point that air travel is at, we would naturally expect the rate of failure to decrease--it would have to, as we wouldn't expand to that point until it had.
It is a real issue, but bad analogies don't help with illuminating anything.
Per dollar, per mile it bloody well should be.
You think so? NASA operates on a shoestring budget that is so microscopic compared the Department of Defense or virtually any other government agency it's pathetic. As a former employee, I can tell you firsthand that the public, and pardon my expression, ignorant opinions of most of the US population (read: voters) are -way- off-base. Compare the annual budget of NASA to, say one Naval warship, or one fleet of Army communication vans, or virtually anything DoD. Seriously. If you or others want to bitch about the way NASA is funded, back it up with some facts, and look around. I'll even help you!
NASA Budget
This reality check brought to by the Office of Management and Budget!
Shooting up a crew of seven to do what an unmanned lifting rocket could do for a 20th the price, or simply to dick around on a space station for a few months is simply a stupid risk to make. Yuri Gargarrin proved that humans could exist in space, that was we need to know until we think of something worthwhile to actually do up there. Perhaps the Russians found the first worthwhile thing to do with people up in that stupid domain of nothingness: provide entertainment for tourists for money. But now, because of the shuttles being suspended, the Russians need to use their soyutzs to ferry people to and fro from that stupid floating junkpile we call the ISS and they don't have any in reserve to do usefull things like make money.
You'd be hard pressed to make the airline industry perform so well
ROTFLMAO! That's why pilots and flight attendants have a 30 - 80 day (depending on the length of flight) average lifespan? And don't give me no crap about how the space shuttle flys further in a trip, because all that goes wrong happens on takeoff (Chalanger) and landing (Columbia), just like a plane.
Don't get me wrong, I am all for scientific discovery, but everything useful that can by done with humans in space was done in the sixties, now space "research" seems to be just a way to subsidise wothless contractors and risk people's lives, not that there arn't things worth dying for, it's just drumming in the point repeatadly that humans can live in space is hardly one of them. Maybe the money spent on maintaining those "reusable" monstrocities that cost more to maintain than any disposable rockets in existance (except maybe saturn V) could be spent in theoretical, non-dangerous, non-wasteful research by our friendly accedemics to find out how humans in space might actually benifit us as a race
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
The American space program did not start because we though we could reap some tangible benefits. The American space program started because we had something to prove. Specifically, we had to prove that our ideology is superior to Communism, and that if they can put a satellite in orbit, then by God so can we. Yes, there are obvious defence implications as well (i.e., if you want to spy on people, satellites are your best bet), but mostly America was driven solely by public relations reasons. The moon landing especially.
Now, let's look at the current contenders. The USA has already proved to everybody that they won't be messed with -- anyone who thinks different can just take a look at the smoking ruins of Iraq. Russia has no money, like you said. The EU doesn't have that much money either, and they don't have the nationalistic spirit that the US used to have. North Korea has nukes but no food.
The only country left is China. They have been doing better economically recently. They have a massive population. And, unlike everyone else, they do have something to prove: they want to prove that the Communist ideals are superior to Western imperialist pig-dog propaganda.
Perhaphs America will take notice again when Chinese astronauts land on Mars. Until then, China is really the world's only hope for manned space flight. Regrettably so.
>|<*:=
The one thing you are missing is that the Department Of Defense is a constitutionally legitimate enterprise for the government. According to a strict reading of the constitution, NASA shouldn't be funded with public money for anything that doesn't have direct military application.
(49% IIRC, but don't quote me on it)
It's closer to 25%, actually.
BTW, I think NASA/society sets the bar too-high for astronauts ... a crew of high school kids with an old-fart chaperone (someone who is 28-years old) would do a far better job than the over-qualified astronauts ... real-life example is the reactor control room of a US Navy submarine.
I believe Juanita
Well, that's fine and dandy, but since the shuttle never makes it above LEO (low earth orbit), there's not that much there to see that hasn't been seen before...
So if you insist on sending people to LEO just because you can, why not do it safely and cheaply in a non reusable orbiter, carried on top of a old fashioned rocket.
As others have mentioned the Soyuz has a remarkable safety record, and it was built and operated by the Soviets, not usually held in high regard in safety engineering circles (just look at the disaster waiting to happen that is the RBMK nuclear reactor, and the list goes on and on).
And now that you have the international space station for extended stays, you don't even need a big vehicle you can camp in while doing whatever you want to do. Shuttle people to and from the space station in a simple cheap non-reusable craft, send the parts to build it by unmanned heavy lift rockets, and do something exiting with the money left over, such as exploring space. Something the shuttle has had very little to do with I might add. No interplanetary mission was ever lift off by the shuttle.
Stefan Axelsson
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?"
Personally, I'd feel pretty good about taking a risk -- any risk -- if I knew there was a ~2% chance of failure. Turn it around, because it also means there's a ~98% chance of success.
*Those* are odds I can live with.
It's a stupid argument anyway. Nobody knows the chances of a given catastrophic event happening. What's being examined is the rate of failures versus rates of success, and that's not a probablilty, it's just a ratio.
Is grounding the shuttle fleet for the next ten years a good idea? Well, I don't have all the facts but the failure rate does suggest that the programme does need to be more closely examined.
There are two critical factors that determine the reliability of the shuttle. The first is the number of "mission critical" systems, which is simply the number of systems that there is no backup for and if they go bad a disaster occurs. (Fuel tanks, boosters, heat tiles, etc) The second is the reliability of those mission critical systems.
As I recall there is somewhere around 20 mission critical parts. These parts are designed to have a reliability of 0.999. That means individually we should expect any one of these parts to fail 1 out of every 1,000 uses. They were not designed to be more reliable for cost reasons. Getting more "9s" of reliability is exponentially expensive. But the important factor to remember is that the probability of failure is additive so while the chance of a single part failure is quite low, the collective chance of a system failure is significantly far from zero:
Chance of failure = (1-0.999) * 20 = 0.02 = 2%
This means there is a roughly 2% chance of each shuttle mission failing catastrophically. After 113 missions the number of shuttles we should expect to see blow up is
2.26 = (1-0.999)* 20 * 113
Note this does not mean that we will see 2.26 shuttle failures. Rather it means that on average we should expect to see one blow up roughly every 50-60 missions. We might see the next 3 blow up, or we might not see one blow up for 150 missions, but over the long run we will lose one roughly every 50-60 missions.
There are two ways to improve this. Have fewer mission critical systems or design the systems we have for better reliability. The first means getting a new launch system because the shuttle design can't be dramatically altered at this point. The second means a much more expensive shuttle, which congress is unwilling to fund.
I find it very ironic that congress blames NASA for explosions that were virtually assured by the budget congress gave NASA for the shuttle program. (Please note: whether you think NASA and/or the shuttle program is a good investment or not is irrelevant to the point I just made) My point is that once you fix a budget and a design, the system's reliability is fairly deterministic. The expected failure rate of shuttles was known at the time the program was started. Congress blaming NASA exclusively for the explosion is ignorant at best and hypocritical at worst. If fault must be assigned (and I don't think it really needs to be) Congress is probably more at fault than anyone else in this case. My $0.02 anyway.
Just because the DoD has a larger budget does not mean that NASA's budget is not also very large. $15 billion is one-fourth of the entire one year budget for the entire state of Texas, which has one of the largest budgets of any state in the USA. If you still want to tell me that $15 billion is a shoestring budget, then you'd better start worrying more about what little the states have to work with and less about NASA. You have a warped perspective on this if you truly think $15 billion is not a lot of money.
when you consider these VOLUNTEERS enter the most dangerous and inhospitable of environments known to man (a vacum), and return safely in nearly 99% of missions, then the risk becomes more acceptable.
To ground the program due to what seems to me an exceptional track record given the extreme nature of their work is beyond senseless, a disaster occured in which information can be garnered to prevent such catastrophies from occuring again. Because a ship was lost does not justify reasoning that the entire organization is flawed. This is high risk work people, and generaly high risk work runs into intermittent tragedies that illuminate problems to be prevented int the future.
Now at this point im sure plenty of people will chime in, that what if these tragedies can be averted by further research and development... etc.... This logic however falls short because we cant prepare for every possible imaginable disaster, we cant protect ourselves from millions of potential disasters that are beyond boundless in scope and possibilities. An ill timed solar flare on a certain region of the sun could wreck ireprable damage on all the electrical systems on earth, so should we just not go into space at all considering that may happen (and trust me, we dont have the tech to protect ourselves from a strong enough flare)
so then the real question becomes acceptable risk. is a 1-2% failure rate acceptable? I would have to say yes, and most risk-analysers would agree.
the second question is risk vs profit. this is far more tricky, as many have mentioned what THEY believe to be pointless or fruitless expiraments done in space, which provide little benfit given the risk and cost of the endeavor. In my honest opinion almost any reasonable research in space is at this point priceless, even manned research is of an in-estimable value to mankind. The results may not lend any imediatly profitable outcomes to buisness ventures, but on the whole the entire endeavor does many things, it first of all provides a wealth of knowledge otherwise completly unattainable on earth to the scientific knowledge of all humanity. We are talking about research that is impossible to obtain otherwise. Second of all it gives us, humans, a goal beyond this planet, a sense of a greater direction, a destiny of sorts that we can all build towards. I know that sounds grandiose and over the top, but look at our cultures far back into time, breaking boundries and pushing limits to find new things has been the legacy of humans since we could write on walls. And lets face it folks, as far as earth goes we're begging to reach the boundries here-in.... the space program has been giving us a new frontier that is important for the well-fare of the human psyche and our global culture. Thirdly the program creates jobs on more levels than NASA, there are contractors, and the companies that support the contractors, most people in the end are somehow connected to NASA through the MANY companies that support, supply, or buy from her.
while no-one has seriously proposed to stop NASA, grounding her is a similar action in that it would kill a great amount of drive behind her development. And in my opinion NASA's development is one of THE MOST IMPORTANT things earth should be doing right now.
i agree that reviewing the processes behind how NASA operates should happen frequently, but hampering her as well is worse than foolish, it is counter-productive, and potentialy catostrophic in it's own right. If anything we should be pumping more money into appropriate portions of NASA and concentrating on creating and achieving even grander goals in shorter spans of time.
a manned mission to mars should have been accomplished years ago.... there should have been a manned (or at least unmanned) station ON the moon decades ago, there should have been hundreds more probes sent through our measly solar system, and many more things.
the space race has died, and needs to be revived for the greater good of all.
If commercial space ventures can get a jump-start soon (as they seem nearly there), then we may find ourselves finaly advancing at an acceptable rate.
--Idiots, Every single one of YOU, A flaming mass of conglomerated morons, hey wait a second, isnt that how RAID works?
> 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.
If you die in service - you were a volunteer who knew (or should have known) that this could happen. You get paid good money for taking that risk. Your family know that this could happen - and you impose that risk on them when you choose to sign up.
If you work in a supposedly safe office job - or working in a restaurant or cleaning an office building, you do not expect to die that way. Your family has a reasonable expectation that this kind of thing won't happen.
And (struggling to get back on-topic) if you are an astronaut - you and your family should certainly be aware that there's a one in fifty-ish chance of you not surviving a mission.
There is a difference - I don't know if it's enough of a difference to explain this disparity - but you can't utterly discount it.
www.sjbaker.org
As you said yourself two of the arguments don't really hold. There just isn't any money in reparing satelites, LEO or geosynchronous, just lanuch a new one. And geography takes care of the rest. There is one left though, return of heavy objects. Granted it's not that much of an issue, what heavy objects are there to be returned in one piece? A few hundred kilos will go a long way towards deorbiting anything worthwhile. There simply isn't hundreds of tons sitting up there waiting to come down.
But the answer is not that hard anyway. You design something that does deorbit a ton or two (it's not that hard to do). I'd bet that that could be done cheaper than the cost of a few shuttle flights. You only need a large enough parachute (perhaps metal vanes initially) and landing it in the ocean. Since there's no people involved landing shock etc can be much higher.
Looking at the dollars involved, the cheap thing is probably to scrap the existing shuttle fleet, and redesign non-reusable craft to go atop existing US rockets. Granted they weren't built for manned flight, but operational records aren't that bad for some of the more tried and tested designs.
Hell, if memory serves the Titan IV is cheaper per shot than a shuttle launch, and you don't even have to bother about what to do with the junk once you've used it! ;-)
Stefan Axelsson
I don't usually agree with politicians, but this guy is right. I am a big fan of the space program, but the Shuttles should be put in museums, never to fly again.
It is astonishing that so many people want to keep the Shuttles flying when they are so obviously a fundamentally flawed, dangerous, ridiculously bad system, which has killed 14 people and will kill more if it stays in operation.
I attribute it to national pride. People are blinded by the associations created between the Shuttle and the national image. There is also the lingering competiveness of the Space Race, which leads people to insist that the Shuttles are "better" and "technologically superior" than Soyuz, when it is statistically obvious that the Shuttle is far less reliable, astronomically more expensive, and much more likely to kill the crew.
The Shuttle is a first-generation product and we could do much better! It is apparent that a far safer, more efficient, cheaper system could be built without too much effort. Why can't NASA and the rest of the country forget the flying dinosaur from the 70's and move on?
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.
NASA itself, if it wasn't a stagnant bureaucracy, should be able to realize the many advantages of a new vehicle, including more frequent, faster launches, more flexibility and reliability, the elimination of lots of antiquated infrastructure, the elimination of lots of effort on maintenance, the glamour of a new, flashy, romantic vehicle, and most importantly, no more PR nightmares from killing astronauts in large groups! A new vehicle could revitalize NASA by making it easy to launch all kinds of missions. NASA needs to wake up to the untenable position of supporting this piece of junk. They are foolish to stake their reputation on it. It is yet more proof that NASA no longer innovates or embraces change; it merely tries to continue doing business as usual.
It is sickening that we will be sending up more astronauts on this death machine. They deserve to have more value placed on their lives by NASA and the rest of the nation. The astronauts are brave and dedicated, and they know the risks, but that is no reason to keep allowing them to face a extremely high probability of catastrophic death.
Even if it weren't prone to exploding, the absurdly high costs of operating the Shuttles should be reason enough to get rid of them. It would be far cheaper and easier to use expendable rockets for everything the Shuttles do now. NASA could buy a hundred Soyuz, launch a massive wave of new space missions, and still save money over trying to continue operating the Shuttles.
Hopefully, Burt Rutan's new civilian spacecraft will succeed, helping to make everyone realize that getting into space can be cheap and easy, and just what a stupid waste of time keeping the Shuttles going really is.
Who was our closest ally in Iraq?
Great Britain (Nukes.)
How, exactly, did we bully them?
For those of you not up on your accident theory, a guy named Charles Perrow developed a model in which he proposes that there are always going to be the 2% accidents -- total, unpredictable, catastrophic failures. While most incidents telegraph themselves a mile wide and a mile deep, some are just practically unavoidable.
The other side of the coin is that with something as potentially catastrophic and as politically charged as space exploration, we should be aiming even to try to eliminate as many of those "2% Accidents" as possible, which can be done more or less, but takes a lot of work, with (seemingly) minimal return.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Not really. The UK has nukes too. And I don't think that the opinion of a country that rolls over its citizens with tanks (that's China, in case you have forgotten) for protesting peacefully is worth any consideration. Neither does one that in the past executed many thousands, if not millions of dissidents without trial. As for France, well they smell funny.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Foreign aid isn't the problem. Domestic pork-barrel is.
If the Shuttle program wasn't DESIGNED, from the START, to make the most constituents the most money, and was rather designed to SEND MEN INTO SPACE, that's exactly what we would have got - a program designed to send men safely and economically into space.
Instead, we get a system spread over as many Congressional districts as possible, with as many fingers in the pie as can possibly squeeze in... it's like pigs feeding at a trough.
To generalize: You want to fix the government? Ban money.
-Hentai [in vita non pacem est]
NASA is a jobs program for bureaucrats, and a goldmine for companies like . . . Lockheed-Martin.
Lockheed-Martin has no interest in seeing NASA shut down the shuttle - quite the opposite. Government contracting in general and NASA in particular are great cash-cows for LMC and for all the companies on the list you've cited.
Aging, sclerotic bureaucracies flying obsolete, overly-complex 'spacecraft' don't explore new frontiers.
The future of spaceflight doesn't lie with NASA - it lies with private ventures like Xcor. Taking the manned mission away from NASA and pushing them the hell out of the current command-and-control, false economy of the Shuttle-distorted launch market is the best thing that could happen to the cause of manned spaceflight.
"(The first shuttle, Enterprise, could not lift off on its own so it was retired. It had to be launched from the back of a 747.)"
While you are correct, i just want to clarify. Enterprise was built as a test shuttle, it was used for glide testing and did not have most the systems to work, engines, space life support. It was built to make sure the glider aspect of it would work. So it wasn't that it was to heavy, or retired, it was just never intended for space flight.
Want a reason to continue on the program?
Imagine halting all the program right now until we build a perfect space vehicle (if ever). Assume it takes 10 years to achieve it. Now then what? These future space flight controlers will have to relearn all the skills that have not been exercised. 10 years = 1 generation, folks. Skills may be written down (if luck would have it); but these space programs have been heavily relying on "hand-on" skills that have been passed on from one generation to the next. If we halt the activity now, the U.S. will have to relearn the skill all over again.
Do you think we can build another Saturn rocket and launch it in one year? I've talked with my former boss at NASA over lunch and figured out that the particular skill has been lost, most likely because these NASA engineers are either retired or dead for a long, long time.
I understand the risk is there. I know, I am trying to become an astronaut. And I don't mind risking my life for continuing on what seems one of humans' finest achievements.