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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.
Why rush it? According to his math in another 187.5 flights, the shuttle fleet will be destroyed anyways.
Trolling is a art,
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.
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.
There are two schools of thought in Texas:
1) Edukayshun (phonetic manglings).
2) Mathematical Miscalculation.
I think they are planning on adding a third one in 2004:
3) Piracy Through Accounting
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
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.
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!!!
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
If we can get it so that the shuttles are built, launched, and landed in West Virginia, and renamed as well (i.e, "Senator's Bird"), we can get the program more than adequately funded as a pork program by Senator Robert Byrd.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
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
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 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
From Robert W. Bussard's letter to Congress regarding the Tokamak fusion program:
Seastead this.
'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)
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.
Auto and plane stats are given as deaths per N miles. Now that would be an interesting and possibly more valid statistic. Shuttle deaths or even Space program deaths *per mile*!
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.
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.
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.
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?
Dude, are you saying people should risk their lives to do stupid little experiments with ant farms and shit? Come on.
There's nothing wrong with taking a breather and trying to minimize risk. It's obvious these shuttle people are totally incompetent.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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!
... I am ashamed this guy is from Texas.
Do I get to appear naked on the cover of Entertainment Magazine now or what?
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
--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..
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)
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.
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"
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.
>|<*:=
Let me say, as someone who actually attended the Space and Aeronautics Subcommittee hearing, that this cynical Barton- and government- bashing is ridiculous. What the Yahoo article failed to point out was that Barton unequivocally affirmed his support for manned space flight and ambitious space exploration, and has in fact supported every NASA budget request (read: every ill-designed, failed NASA initiative) over the last ten years.
His remarks were made thoughtfully and deliberately, not banging a shoe on the table. And as to remarks by MagusAptus that "Just goes to show that we elect the brightest and the best to congress. It would just seem reasonable that if we had to have these committees on everything, then the members of those committees should have at least *some* knowledge or background in the area," Congessman Barton has actually been on the S&A Subcommittee since the early '80s; he served when the Challenger crashed. And he also earned a B.A. in Industrial Engineering from Texas A&M.
"Want in one hand and spit in the other and see which one fills up first." - My Dad
From The Simpsons:
Tom: It's a lovely day for a launch, here, live at Cape Canaveral, at
the lower end of the Florida Peninsula, and the purpose of
today's mission is truly, really electrifying.
Man 2: That's correct, Tom. The lion's share of this flight will be
devoted to the study of the effects of weightlessness on tiny
screws.
Tom: Unbelievable, and just imagine the logistics of weightlessness.
And of course, this could have literally millions of applications
here on Earth -- everything from watchmaking to watch repair.
Homer: Boring.
[tries to switch channels, but the batteries fall from the
remote control]
No! The batteries!
Tom: Now let's look at the crew a little.
Man 2: They're a colorful bunch. They've been dubbed "the Three
Musketeers". Heh heh heh --
Tom: And we laugh legitimately. There's a mathematician, a different
_kind_ of mathematician, and a statistician.
Homer: Make it stop! [panics]
- First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then ???, then profit.
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
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
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.
Correction: Our stupid country spent 300Bn NOT destroying Iraq.
We could have turned the sand to glass at a much lower cost. Why didn't we? Because we're saving ourNUKEs for FRANCE!!
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
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. This is inaccurate in several respects. The Soyuz/R7 launch vehicle has a 97.5% success rate (1 failure per 40 missions). 106 of those launches have been manned with 2 fatal failures (Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11) and several aborted missions, including the Soyuz T-10A, where the launch vehicle exploded and only the recovery system saved the cosmonauts.
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!
Not to defend the man, because this is a stupid stance to take, but he represents an area near here at the University of Texas at Arlington, and the primary reason he would have such a high level of contributions from Lockheed Martin is because they have several locations in this area.
Opensecrets.org is based on how much employees of that company give; there's a MUCH higher than normal concentration of Locheed Martin employees in this area and in his district.
When making allegations like that, you should probably check into the facts. I'm sure that LMCO has some sort of sway with Joe, but there are many, many other corporations in this area that have just as much sway, if not moreso. For once, I don't think this politician's actions are based on something shady a campaign contributer has asked them to do. These stupid remarks really were just his thoughts on the issue. Scary.
"Stupid White Men" is only worth reading if you're interested in the techniques that Michael Moore employs to *severely* distort the truth.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
Michael Moore is pretty funny at times, but he is not exactly a reliable source of information. If you want to learn something about American politics you would be better off reading a good biography of a President or two. You will find plenty of sensational dirt to keep you entertained, and you might actually learn something.
Seriously, saying that you learned about US politics from "Stupid White Men" would be like me saying that I learned everything I need to know about German politics by listening to "Die Gerd Show".
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.
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
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?
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
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.
you aren't familiar with a math principle called reduction? 1-in-62.5 is equal to 2-in-125
The shuttle has flown closer to 125 times than it has to 62.5. I think that the Columbia disaster occurred on missios STS-107, which according to NASA, was the 113th mission of the shuttle.
FWIW, the STS-# designation of the mission is it's originally scheduled launch sequence - that is, STS-107 was slated originally to be the 107th launch. In the end, though, the launch order changes for a variety of reasons. The various recent problems with cracks, crewing issues, shuttle readiness, payload readiness, etc, cause NASA to shift the actual launch order around quite a bit.
woof!
People who breathe oxygen have a 100% chance of dying at some point.
Hold your breath! Boycott oxygen!
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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 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.
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.
Who was our closest ally in Iraq?
Great Britain (Nukes.)
How, exactly, did we bully them?
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.
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...
With regards to "There's also an interesting piece on testimony given by the first Shuttle program manager.", the author of this op ed is well known for wanting to scrap all human in space activities. This should be considered when reading the article.
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.
Rep. Joe Barton (news, bio, voting record), a member of the House Science Committee's space and aeronautics panel, wants the government to build a new, safer space vehicle or modify the shuttle so it can be flown unmanned.
It's a pure safety argument that includes pouring more 'billions' into the existing Space Shuttles. Ironic for a Congressman from a state that has no problem with liquor and firearms in moving vehicles.
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.
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.
"(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.
Urm, well, yes. Halliburton, the company VP Cheney worked for. Did business with Iraq before the first war, between the wars (even if Cheney denied it) and now got government contracts after this war.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
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.