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NASA Redesigning The Space Shuttle
ekarjala writes "To avoid wing damage from foam separation in the future, NASA is planning a redesign of the existing shuttle. Seems to me it is time to consider a new design rather than a redesign -- let's take the lessons we've learned and create a space craft for the 21st century rather than re-treading a 30-year-old design."
God Bless America!
If you disagree then it must be overrated, redundant or trolling.
I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
But let's look at something:
Time
- It would take minimum of 10 years to design, build, and test a working model.
- We've got the ISS flying right now that needs service and crew changes-- and more often than the Russian Soyuz can provide. While I'm on the Soyuz-- their last flight wasn't so hot either. That was a new model, too. Did you know it takes 18 mos. to build a Soyuz capsule? Did you know they barely have enough money and crew to meet the six month demand for the ISS? Do you trust the Russians to go drum up people from the unemployment line to ramp up production? Do you... ah, nevermind.
- Space is not easy or safe. The fact that we've only lost three crews in forty years of space flight is totally remarkable! It is not a safe environment. Tito and the other dude who flew on the Soyuz took their life into their own hands-- and hell I would do the same in a heartbeat! But it is not safe. It is extremeley dangerous and every astronaut knows that. Citizens forget that.
Money- It will take billions of dollars to pick one of the many designs for the next orbital plan/vehicle, build and test ONE.
- We also face increased spending on defense, security, and welfare. (Damn terrorists, criminals, lazybones, and old folks) Which one will you cut?
People see NASA's record and watch Enterprise every week and think it's an easy thing. It is not!I TOTALLY agree that we do need a new vehicle. But we can't just mothball the Shuttle and stick 'em in museums. They have to be toughened up and fly for the next ten years until the new vehicle is ready. I REALLY want a new vehicle now! But I am fatally realistic: the shuttle will be permanently grounded, the borrowcrats will cut NASA some more causing the space plane to take too long, and the ISS will probably do the SpaceLab thing.
"You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas"
Sen. Davy Crocket to US Congress, Nov. 1, 1835
The following promises were made to us in the early days of the Shuttle: all these promises have failed to materialize.
It's more of a space Chevy pickup. When I think of trucks, I think of semis--things capable of carrying huge loads over long distances. The Saturn V rocket, the reliable workhorse of the Apollo program, could launch over 250,000 pounds to low Earth orbit or even put men on the moon. The Shuttle, by comparison, can only put 58,000 pounds into low Earth orbit and cannot reach higher orbits. Saturn V rockets made the 250,000-mile trip to the moon not once but several times, while the highest the Shuttle has ever gone is a meager 385 miles (335 nautical miles) during STS-82.
In fact, the Shuttle is so sharply limited that it rarely deploys a satellite directly. Instead, the satellite is mounted to yet another rocket, carried to low orbit in the Shuttle cargo bay, and the second rocket then kicks it into proper orbit. I don't understand the logic: we launch the Shuttle into orbit so we can have astronauts risk life and limb
Endeavour cost $2.1 billion (source) and each launch costs $450 million (source) per mission. Most of that expense is taken up in refurbishing the Shuttle afterwards, where so much of the Shuttle is disassembled, inspected, replaced and reassembled that it's fair to declare it ``rebuilding'' instead of ``refurbishing''.
More than this, not one single flight component of the Shuttle--not one!--has met its original flight rating. For example, the Shuttle's main engines were originally rated for 27,000 seconds of thrust (about 55 flights). After that time, the engines would have to be replaced. This design goal has not been met. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman wrote in the official report on the Challenger disaster, ``[t]he engine now requires very frequent maintenance and replacement of important parts, such as turbopumps, bearings, sheet metal housings, etc.
Between maintenance, rebuilding and inspections, it's not uncommon for a given shuttle to only go up once a year. In Columbia's case, its final mission was its twenty--eighth flight in twenty--two years of service, and its second since 1999. We are nowhere near 26 launches per year per Shuttle; we aren't even close.
Hardly. Each launch costs $450 million. Even if the fleet were capable of 26 launches per shuttle per year, there's no way we could afford it. Instead of costing one hundred dollars to put a pound into orbit (as we were promised by NASA in the 1970s), it costs $7,750 ($450 million per flight, divided by 58,000 pounds of cargo). A 7,650%-cost overrun per flight can be read one and only one way: an engineering failure.
By comparison, the Saturn V rocket could put a pound into orbit for $3,500, and a Russian Proton-M for $2,062.
If the official NASA line of $450 million per flight isn't mind--boggling enough
The first shuttles cost $1.7 billion. Endeavour cost $2.1 billion