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Shuttle Set for Launch on Dec 18th, Says NASA
Tony J Case writes "Just a quick note for you guys - According to space.com, NASA's target date for the next shuttle launch is Dec. 18th, with a whole bunch of new guidelines."
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And I hope they never stop. No matter what disaster strikes or how trgic it all seems at the time. Hopefully they are looking at new safer technologies at the same time though.
I went to battle MC Escher but drew a blank
Last time we lost a shuttle, it took almost 10 years to recover, this time we are pressing on. Smarter harder and quicker.
Lesson Learned moving on now.
Food not Bombs is a nice platitude but it breaks down when you notice that the Bombees are usually well fed
Continuing to fly the shuttle,l and explore space is definitely the best memorial they could ever give to the people on Columbia.
When so many people are at fault, nobody is at fault.
Disagree all you want to, I'm just happy that the space program was not ended.
Fly on, NASA.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
This is the best news I've heard all week. It is good to know that NASA has a timeline for the next shuttle launch. And I thought I was being optimistic thinking they would launch this time next year. This is a good omen amongst all of the scandals, lawsuits, and wars we've been reading about lately.
I can't help cheering at this news.
OK, a really bad thing happened, but let's learn from it and move on to bigger and better things. I really feel that launching the shuttle again is, symbollically if nothing else, a positive sign that NASA won't abandon manned space missions, something that seemed to be on the cards after the Columbia disaster.
Space exploration (or just working in space) is dangerous - it always has been and (for the forseeable future at least) always will be. There will always be setbacks and it's an expensive 'business', but exploration and curiosity is one of the things that makes us human (see my sig).
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Thank goodness its time for them to launch again. Nobody said space travel would be perfect and without casualties. Its a learning process. If something happens, fix it and try again. My hats off to all astronauts.
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
The explosion of the shuttle Columbia in February was a similar test of American resolve, but the test was much more concentrated... on the space program, particularly the shuttle program. On the heels of that disaster and through the months that have followed, our message is clear: we are not going to let calamity or insanity destroy our dreams for the impossible. We are going to continue to explore our universe, both near and far, and no minor disaster (minor on the timeline of human history) is going to offset the progress of human knowledge.
Face it, is the the American way. In fact, it is the human way: Life will go on, and we will always be there to try to make it better.
Unless a method unlike our rockets is developed, a cheap vehicle for leaving the earth is impossible.
It is unrealistic until we gain alot more experience, to expect space travel to be safe. All that can be done is try to minimize risk. Those travelling should be fully informed as to the dangers. I doubt many astronauts expect it to be fully safe.
Space travel is too important to mankind not to pursue it, even at great expense and some loss of human life. Congrats to them on keeping the shuttle going. If the program died, it might not be replaced in such a shortsighted world.
The amazing thing to me is how FEW atronauts have died in such dangerous conditions.
We live in a doubly amazing age. An era when machines became intelligent entities, and when the naked apes learned to leave this little rock called earth. Evolution is AMAZING!!!
HenryJamesFeltus.com
I'm curious, how DOES Russia handle things?
In my lifetime I've seen two space accidents. I've seen hundreds of missions flown. I'd say our percentage is pretty good (99% if they've flown only 200 missions in my lifetime, which I find hard to believe). How often does Russia fly? How many astronauts per flight? How do their numbers stack up against ours?
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
... to see that this useless vehicle is put back into operation, wasting money that could be spent for good space science and efficient transportation.
A winged vehicle has nothing but disadvantages, except looking nice on TV when landing:
- Wings impose a huge weight penalty
- Re-entry with wings is unstable and requires active control
- Wings are vulnerable due to their large surface
The space shuttle is anything but re-usable. The boosters are not re-used, the tank is lost anyway and after landing, the shuttle is completely dis- and re-assembled.
State-of-the-art expendable launchers can haul people into space (and bring them safely back) at a fraction of the cost: use a ballistic capsule with escape rocket and a parawing for enhanced flexibility during landing.
The shuttle's only purpose is to fly to the ISS. The ISS's only purpose is to justify the existence of the shuttle. For the Hubble telescope alone, the shuttle would never have been built.
Re-usable craft are (in theory) safer, potentially cost-saving (although they haven't been so far), have tended to be more spacious, and have a significant psychological effect, which should not be discounted.
It has been said that a second shuttle which would normally have taken a couple of months to prepare could be readied in a bit over a week but the launch would then be another massive risk as the normal procedures would be by-passed.
Whether NASA has any plans for a standby for the future remains to be seen but it could prove extrememly costly to always have the next shuttle immediately ready.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Mixed feelings on this, the shuttle has to go, but till we pull our heads out and get something better (and vastly more simple) we are stuck. I worked with Commander Rick Husband's brother, who is an Airline Captain. Rick made a few visits out to our hangar and did some great PR after his first shuttle flight. By all accounts, he was a fantastic guy and a great ambassador for human spaceflight. We all followed the progress of his flight, and I was stunned when I saw the footage of the accident. These are real people on these missions, with family and friends, and I pray that NASA and the beaucracy that puts up the shuttle never has another disaster.
Well, had a Soyuz TM broke up on reentry, we would have rescued the ISS guys. The Soviet/Russian manned space program is much more simple than ours, and a Soyuz cannot even touch the payload capacity of the Shuttle.
We can have debates all day about if a manned spacecraft should be nothing more than a way to get up and back, but that's for another day. Both failures of the shuttle have been directly related to their re-usability, and that's something the Russians don't have to worry about.
-twb
The last "space race" got us to the moon with 1960's-era technology. Maybe another one today is just the kick in the ass NASA needs.
People, myself included, have faulted NASA for past mismanagement of safety concerns. But my real concern is that they spend billions upon billions of dollars and employ thousands of the brightest engineers and scientists, and still make some of the stupidest mistakes which cost lives and money, but most importantly time.
They have monopolized space exploration in the US far too long and provided a poor model for the rest of the world to follow, which has stifled innovation. They should be handing out research and exploration grants like the NSF does and performing reviews of the results to determine future funding. Not running a single space program for a single space station. All our eggs in one basket, as it goes.
Arguments about the airworthiness of the space shuttle to me are pointless. It is a big machine with lots of parts and carries some risk of failure. It has been show to be able to fly successfully a high percentage of the time. Nothing they do to it will fundamentally change that situation. But by being the only game in town there can be no comparison of risk and no judgements made based on that comparison.
NASA asks us, either fly or do not fly. This is not a free choice, to those of us that wish to see humans fly it means that we must choose the space shuttle regardless of risk or incompetence or anything.
NASA will undoubtedly want more money to increase the safety of the space shuttle flights, but to what end? Any machine can be better maintained or operated, if we collectively choose a single means, and spend our collective resources and will on that means we could be on a fools errand. Like driving a car into the ocean. Sure we can keep tuning our procedures and plugging the leaks, but it ain't gonna get us to the other side. So that basic questions of design or operation are essentially meaningless when one only tries or has a single means. Like voting for the only candidate, the choice presented to us is meaningless. To go or not to go. To live or to die. Of course we must go, as we must live.
Or do we? Maybe, when such a stark choice is put before us we must refuse to make it. Refuse the question. Should the shuttle fly or not? Ignore the question, it is inconsequencial to that which many of us care about. Space exploration is the purpose and the question, not the shuttle.
Exploration of space is dangerous and will not survive safety concerns of collective action. Liken it to any human endeavor of significant unknown and danger and you will find it must be done by individuals. Individuals that have clarity of vision and certainty of purpose. It must be done by people, not by institutions or incorporations. People who know the risks, people that see the dangers, people that take the leap because they see the oppurtunity. People that learn and reason.
If we are to keep NASA at all, then it must only be to find those people and give them a little bit of money or help. Like Queen Isabella giving Christopher Columbus enough money to get the supplies and men he needed. Not too much money though, because we know that to succeed in Space one will have to travel lightly, and the tendency of people with too much money is to buy things. We know that to succeed in space one needs to be quick, but the tendency of people with too much money is to spend time spending money.
I expect the shuttle to fly again, because there are a lot of people who depend on it for their livelyhood. I expect that the shuttle will fly again because looking at the world a certain way, it makes sense to continue to do what we have been doing for the last two decades. I expect the shuttle to fly again because it is a link in a chain that could mean the end of the space station. Because it would mean the end to an entire generation's way of thinking.
So there it is, the heads of NASA would like us to choose between their shuttle and nothing. Between the aspirations of mankind and bondage to this rock. It is a false choice.
then it would most likely be another limited single-goal effort like Apollo.
No, this sort of effort will never happen again, for one very simple reason - it was absolutely staggeringly expensive (at the time). Most people point at Apollo and say how much was achieved (which I'm not disputing), but few people realise just how much money was spent to put a man on the moon. I remember reading (sorry, no ref) that at the height of the Apollo program (which lasted for quite a few years), it was costing about 50 cents (1960 currency remember) per day for every single man, woman and child in the US. Stop and think about that figure for a second - it's mind-blowingly huge.
"Because it's there." - George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Mt Everest, March 18, 1923 (New York Times)
Oh yeah, that's about the brightest idea I've ever heard. SRBs should have NEVER been rated for manned spaceflight...once they're running, they're running, and that's it. No throttling. No kill-switch. You wait until the propellant is gone.
As for the SSMEs not having much to do with getting the orbiter into space I say this: uhhhhh, what?
Here's a great site that explains the physics of the SRBs. Before this page gets Slashdotted to hell and back, I'll recap what it says: each SRB produces 3.3 million pounds of thrust, and each one weighs 1.3 million pounds (191,000 pounds dry-weight, plus 1.1 million pounds of propellant). That means the combined pair can lift about 4 million pounds. The shuttle itself weighs 171,000 pounds (empty, with engines), and the external tank weighs 66,000 pounds. So with a little rounding off, you can add 3.75 million pounds to the stack before you have an equal balance between thrust and weight (which will get you nowhere near orbit). The aforementioned external tank carries 1.3 million pounds of liquid oxygen and 227,000 pounds of liquid hydrogen. More neat rounding brings us to 1.6 million pounds of fuel, 2.15 million pounds remaining. Let's assume the shuttle is carrying its max payload -- 63,500 pounds. Leaves us with 2.08 million pounds.
So:
Booster Stack Weight + Fuel: 4.52 million pounds.
Thrust of SRBs (combined): 6.6 million pounds.
Resulting Thrust-to-Weight Ratio: 1.4.
By comparison, a F-15 has a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.19, giving the shuttle a 15% advantage, when using SRBs alone.
That's right. I haven't forgotten about the SSMEs. When run at 104%, they provide an extra 488,000 pounds of thrust each. That's an extra 1.46 million pounds of thrust. Thus, our 4.52 million pound stack now has a 8.06 million pounds of thrust, resulting in a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.78, or a 66% advantage over the F-15. Note that these figures are assuming that the SSMEs are run at 104% from ignition (which they're not), but also bear in mind that as the shuttle burns fuel, which it does as a prodigious rate, the overall weight of the stack is reduced while the thrust remains constant, so as the vehicle climbs, it's thrust-to-weight ratio improves, and continues to do so after the SRBs are cut loose.
Now, IANARS (RS = Rocket Scientist), but it seems to me that if we want to scale up the SRBs so that they alone can carry the shuttle into orbit, the weight of the propellant is going to exceed the maximum thrust of the SRBs before you can get enough propellant for the entire burn into orbit.
What I'm trying to say is this: leave the rocket science to the rocket scientists.
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> Perhaps the U.S. treasury needs the kick in the ass....
Which is why the original AC figured it'd be delayed until April 15th!
But to get serious for a moment, I'd gladly fly on an unmodified Challenger or Columbia if NASA (had enough spare orbiters) let me. Hey, space is hard, and 98% odds of coming back home are still pretty good for the ride of a lifetime.
But given the enormous political pressure NASA is going to be under to make this Dec. 18, 2003 deadline, even I wouldn't take this flight. The temptation to ignore safety procedures and hope for the best is simply too high.
Winter is a bad time to launch rockets. O-rings freeze and crack overnight. Foam freezes and causes significantly more damage than expected when little bits fall off.
Mid-December is too close to Winter for my tastes. Given the shuttle's notable weather sensitivity, I think launches from Florida should be made only between March and November. Build a Hawaii launchpad and perhaps year-round launches are reasonable, but Florida in mid-December?! These rocket scientist-turned-administrator folks haven't learned a damn thing!
All failed because unexpected delays, manufacturing problems, and cost overruns caused research to take a back seat to budgets. I'm reminded of the Navy not willing to spend the money to test more than 2 Mark torpedoes. Those torpedoes turned out to have several defects that seriously impacted the early phases of the war in the Pacific.
Besides, if you wanted to start from scratch, I know buy some surplus Soviet prototypes.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
My opinion on this: The persuit of space is worth the loss of life. There are people willing to risk their life for these goals. I wish we could get the kind of zeal for the space program that religon has, i.e. have people willing to climb aboard a rocket that MIGHT kill them, instead of strapping a bomb to their chest that WILL kill them.
If we do not achieve a colony on mars or the moon soon, we will get hit by a rock, and the only known setient life form in the universe will be destroyed. And we will be to blame. Me, you, everybody.
I believe if we could redirect the energy given to religon to the persuit of colonizing mars or the moon, we could have it DONE (or at least have ships on the way) within a decade, easy.
M@
Krispy Cream is people