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Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA?
l8f57 writes "Hal Gerham (from the NASA CAIB report) is calling for cargo and people to be separated into different missions. He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle."
Separate the cargo from the crew? That might make sense, but it raises other concerns. It is indeed a tragedy when a shuttle is lost. The crew, the ship, and the cargo are lost.
Are they attempting to minimize the impact of potential losses by proposing this separation? We already know that NASA projected the odds of losing a shuttle. What is it, about than 1 out of 200 or so missions could be a loss? What are the odds of losing both the crew and cargo shuttles during the same mission? If the shuttle carrying the crew is lost, they will be able to continue the mission of the cargo with a new crew, if they can avoid obvious delays.
I realize that NASA may be applying logic about how to make their missions safer, however it appears they are more concerned about protecting themselves, and their bottom line. The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects.
This story reminds me of the movie Capricorn One. NASA was shown as running scared, doing anything necessary to cover their mistakes.
Urantian -- and proud of it!
Ironically, the astronaut's luggage would accidentaly be rerouted to Topeka.
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Great, another opportunity to lose my luggage once I cough up the $20M.
Cargo is already sent up separately from crews... it's just that people have never really tried to meet back up with it...
If I call myself "cargo" will I get a cheaper ticket to space?
Perhaps it would be more cost-efficient to have a single-use ship system, but we have proven the ability to reuse the ship, and thus we have a responsibility to the universe to not produce more space junk than is absolutely necessary. There is no way to know if one of our spent space capsules, drifting off into the far reaches, might cause some other dawning civilization irreperable harm. Thus, we should use our tech ability to limit the abuse of the prime directive.
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For example, if you were planning to start a colony on Mars, you could use cheaper methods to send the suppies to the planet ahead of time. Then, use the most reliable methods to send the people. The whole enterprise would be cheaper, you could use the most reliable methods to ensure that the colonists would arrive safely, and you could guarantee that the supplies would be waiting for the colonists when they did arrive.
...sure, the rest of the people will come right after you in the other ship...
An article written about the idea, this year:
Space Elevators Maybe Closer To Reality Than Imagined
Much more info here:
The Space Elevator Reference
CB
free ipod and free gmail!
So if the personnel and cargo missions would be seperate, if you were rescuing someone from a Russian space station, would you take the Cosmonauts or the vodka?
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Telecommuting is where it's at! One would think that outer space would be a perfect place for astronauts to telecommute. The only reason we still send people into space is to put a human face on billions of dollars - which works well until things start going wrong (an interesting parallel with Iraq).
The flag just makes more sense than the constitution. - Judas Gutenberg
Not offtopic at all.
This is exactly how we could get to Mars safely and economically: by landing as much materiel as possible via unmanned missions, prior to sending humans onboard a craft specifically designed to carry nothing else.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Who needs a lousy space station? It's TV science, with no practical value that couldn't be achieved much cheaper and with no loss of life.
ScienceSeeker.org
NASA: "In order to ensure the safety of the crew in flight, we're shipping all the dangerous gases, such as highly explosive oxygen, up separately."
(hours after launch)
NASA: "Um... we have good news and bad news. The good news is the crew made it into space without a hitch. The bad news is all the cargo that was supposed to go with them was lost due to a malfunction. Errrmmm... how long can you guys hold your breath up there?"
Diplomacy is the art of saying, "Nice doggie!" until you can find a rock.
I agree with this. By separating out the cargo, the personel-carrying missions can actually become more predictable (less variance due to cargo weights) and are unencumbered with the reusability goals. This means Safety can always be the primary goal for person-carrying missions.
Cargo missions are a much more appropriate area to experiment with reusability or cost-lowering goals as the failure costs are significantly lower. NASA would have a much easier time explaining how they blew up a $40 billion cargo payload to the press compared to the media frenzy created when an astronaut dies.
Just look at the media attention given to this last disaster - how much was covering the loss of human life and how much was covering the financial losses incurred?
This may be right on. Re-usable is not as important as robust and safe.
We went to the moon in disposable spacecraft. The simple shape of the Apollo modules is probably a step in the right direction from the current shuttle. A single heat shield with no weak points is probably a better idea than a wing.
Considering that NASA only launches once or twice a year anyway, an extremely reliable one-shot system is probably the way to go.
I think something many people overlook is that large-scale shuttle type vehicles are extremely complex and difficult to engineer. We can't just slap one together and put it on top of one of our current rockets -- nothing is big enough to launch a similar vehicle!
By seperating the system into two less-complex vehicles, they can focus more on the specifics of both vehicles. Instead of making a jack-of-all-trades, good-at-none "solution", the engineers can focus on making sure each vehicle does it's mission well.
As for non-reusable -- so what! For now, that might be the way to go. Perhaps in the near future the system can be modified with next-generation technology, but again, simplicity is where it's at. Let's not make another overly complex mostrosity with tens of thousands of pseudo-redundant interconnected systems.
Dragging people kicking and screaming into reality since 1996.
Not so ironically, this is not funny.
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
-- Fighting mediocrity one bad post at a time.
How is the parent post funny???
I agree 100% with his opinion. Well, minus the part about other civilizations. Space junk is already a problem as is. We have proven we can reuse space ships, so it would be wrong for us to keep dumping trash into space when we know better.
Andre
You are using it all the time.
We really haven't explored the limits of reusability or expendability.
If we were to contract out for expendable boosters, built in as cheaply and expendably as possible in batches of 100, it would end up with the launch costs way below what they are now. Our current batch of expendable boosters are far too complicated and are built far too slowly to give us savings like this. This is what is called the "Big Dumb Booster" notion.
The shuttle is a poor example of reusable boosters. The cost for refurbishing between launches, maintaining an army of technicians, etc. is incredible. If we were able to fly one, with the same safety and without appreciable yearly budget increase, once every week, the shuttle would start to look good.
The CAIB's trying to say what has been repeated over and over and over again. One of the reasons why the shuttle has problems is because they tried to create one space vehicle that can do everything. It's like trying to combine a sedan, truck, and crane into one vehicle.
And it's probably easier to build an inexpensive production-grade partially or fully reusable craft before somebody gets a better idea if it just has to do one or the other.
Gentoo Sucks
http://www.nw.net/mars/docs/nearterm.txt
When you return with a ship of empty space (the cargo bay empty) you are paying an aoerodynamic PRICE. By discarding the cargo transporter, you save because that aerodynamic cost is left in orbit. The aerodynamic cost of the capsule to earth is TINY. That way you can bring back the crew in a capsule,which is easier and safer. So they have to splash down in the ocean, big frickin deal.
buying a couple used Soyuz craft from Russia, and spending a few million to mod them up to NASA's specs? Russia needs the money, the U.S wants an alternative to the shuttle. Win, win? I'm sure it will never happen, but just a thought I had when reading this story.
a few days ago.
Most payloads don't need people around. It's stupid to risk people when they aren't necessary.
A capsule or vehicle that is smaller can be made more robust. If it's on top of the rocket and not too big, an escape rocket can be attached that will increase the opportunities to get people back alive from an accident.
We can use the existing SRB boosters from the shuttle to form the basis of a heavy lift vehicle. With those I bet we could easily build a booster that could triple the lift capacity of the current shuttle or Titan IV rockets. Lifting larger and more completely assembled sections of the ISS to orbit would have saved a dump truck full of money.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
The Columbia mission wasn't a cargo mission. It wasn't even an ISS mission. It was scientific mission using SpaceHab.
So it does make sense for both viable manned and unmanned space flight. I just don't want to see all space exploration done by wire because, ultimately, it just doesn't feel right.
Reusability is orthogonal to this, I think, though once again it Just Makes Sense to reuse what you can. There are extremes that we don't need to go to, though. There aren't too many times I've really wanted a reusable cable tie, for instance.
They only had to kill thirteen astronauts to come to the same conclusion!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Ultimately NASA needs to get back to its beginnings. NASA does the big expensive but basic R&D needed for commercial companies to take over. NASA should have a baseline rocket engine research program continually ongoing. They need to have a standard model rocket engine that is continually upgraded and simplified. the design is then published annually for any and all to use (with security clearance) Same needs to be done with tanks, guidance and control systems, reentry systems, spacesuits, life support systems etc.
"But Gehman insisted that the space shuttle is not inherently unsafe. Instead, he said, it is NASA's management process that is unsafe. "
Why continue to run the shuttle? Why not just use the money for fast development of new vehicles? Cheaper to buy Soyuz/Progress rockets from the Russians for now..
:-)
Now isnt that ironic - The US would end up having to buy what is essentially much the same rocket that Uri Gagarin used in 1961..
"You lied to me! There is a Swansea!"
Admiral Gehman is right. I hope someone is paying attention. He's right because there is no requirement to add a Shuttle crew to a flight that delivers cargo to the ISS. He's right because making a vehicle system safe enough for humans wastes money if the vehicle is also used to carry cargo.
There's too much emphasis on debates about winged spaceplanes versus Apollo-derived capsules; too much debate about reusability versus expendable boosters.
Let's be sensible. If you need to send tons of cargo from New York to Los Angeles, you can stuff into a truck or a freight train. That is, a vehicle deisgned to carry cargo. If you want to send your family from New York to Los Angeles, you would put them on an airplane, a bus, or drive them there in your car. In other words, a vehicle designed to be safe enough and comfortable enough to carry people. We should follow the same principle in getting cargo and people to LEO.
And we don't need to develop new techology to do this. We solved the problem of getting into and out of LEO 40 years ago.
What we need is:
1) A reliable heavy-lift booster that can orbit cargo to the ISS; I argue that we should go the expendable vehicle route because any attempt to design and build a reusable vehicle will add years and dollars chasing a dubious goal. Since the ISS is designed to accept cargo from the Shuttle's bay, I would create this new heavy-lift vehicle by launching the Shuttle without the Orbiter. NASA has had a heavy-lift vehicle within its reach for 25 years and refused to build it, chossing instead to unnecessarily put live at risk. (Meanwhile, we also have the new Delta and Atlas designs at our disposal. Their heavy-lift configurations are nothing to sneeze at.)
2) Every effort to build a winged and resuable spacecraft has failed because it would have required technology that does not exist yet, or cannot be used without skyrocketing costs. The nascent Orbital Spaceplane will face the same problem. Let's shuffle this problem over to the advanced research department, and use technology that we know works to get humans into and out of LEO: capsules. Let's go the Apollo-derived route and get something flying ASAP.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Check out Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars for an example of materiel being sent before the colonists.
Never at a loss for words... because of the voices.
people have met back up with cargo
(hubble repair mission)
I fully agree with you. In general, building something that can handle two different tasks with different constraints is more error-prone than building two separate things.
Cargo is bulky, heavy, but does not require very high safety, nor life sustenance systems. Passengers are less bulky, lighter, but do require high safety and life sustenance systems (air, water, food, toilets...). Those are two different sets of requirements. Remember that NASA and other space agencies do not have unbounded budgets; it's wise to relax a bit on the cargo to be safe on the passengers.
Also, consider the absurdity of satellite launches from the Space Shuttle: you fly into space a crew (plus lots of safety and life sustenance systems) for a task that an automatic system fulfills well.
(Interestingly, having discussed with people designing flight control systems for automated launch vehicles and civil aircraft, I have the impression that safety is far laxer for automated launch vehicles: human lives are not at stake, so they may afford some latitude.)
Experiments have been done with animals, accelerating them more quickly by suspending them in liquids and otherwise distributing the G forces, but the advances in this area of research have been slow and often times erratic. Monkeys have seemed fine after the research, only to show internal damage months or even years later.
That the idea of pre-shipping cargo is being taken seriously is a very, very exciting thing!
It's smart to pick *one* requirement (like, say, get 4 people to and from orbit in the safest manner possible) and let that be the only criteria for equipment design.
It may well be that we'll end up using simple rockets for this, like the Russians. Sure, it's not sexy, but I bet it'll be both cheaper than Shuttle and safer. Shuttle suffered from 'feature creep', from wacky Air Force 'cross-range' requirements and serious pork. Get rid of all that and NASA could build a safer crew vehicle.
We'd then use the (not human-rated) big dumb boosters like Delta and Atlas to get cargo up. That, too, would be cheaper than Shuttle. Hrm. So, why do we have Shuttle again?
You karma whore you! ;)
Breakfast served all day!
I have heard time and time again, that just plain old rockets can be made a lot cheaper then the "money whole" space shuttle. In fact I heard a congressman ask this question of the Nasa head. And the response was, "Well hold on lets fix the shuttle before we talk about something new".
At some point you need to walk away. There where 5 saturns left over and Nasa just cut them into scrap because they wanted the "to low to slow" shuttle.
My question is this, sense I am NOT a rocket scientist, just ask my wife. Is it true? Can you make plain old rockets that cheap and beable to life 50 or 100+ tons into high orbit?
Come the revolution, the Bourgeois, Capitalistic, "A PARKING STICKER HOLDERS", will be first against the wall!
You can't move all combustible and people at the same time. You need to prior upload all combustible, and merge people+ship+combustible on the fly.
Other option is to generate your own combustible on the fly:
go to mars with 50% combustible, generate 50% at mars.. and return.
My english is crap
-Woof woof woof!
>> We have proven we can reuse space ships,
Not really. The only part of the Shuttle that is really re-used is the Orbiter, and that is essentially rebuilt between flights. We lose the fuel tank, and need to fish the solid booster out of the Atlantic before they, too, are rennovated for use again.
If you're think that we've got a spacecraft that is reusable in the same sense that an airplane is reusable, we don't. And, we may never have.
As for space junk, it is only a problem if you're in LEO around this planet. It isn't going anywhere else.
(Besides, I wish people would understand the scale of the Universe and realize that being in LEO around Earth means you're only a couple hundred miles, at most,from sea level. That's like going from Boston to New York. Even something as close as the Moon is about 1,000 times farther away. The Universe is unimaginably large; our space junk is simply skimming the edge of our atmosphere.)
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Sorry, I couldn't help it.
Calling the shuttle reusable is specious at best. The thing requires a $500Million retrofit for EVERY SINGLE FLIGHT it makes. The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...
It's a one-time use vehicle that we are spending unholy sums of money to fly repeatedly. A split system is a much better idea-- launch the people on a small but completely reliable people-mover, to catch up with a large-but-sloppy-and-cheap cargo hauling ship. Sure, you'll lose an occasional cargo ship-- but if you can make it enough cheaper, people can afford to rebuild and send their crap up twice for the same price as one trip today.
Of all the answers, maybe we are ready for the carbon-fiber tethered space elevator to be built...
Its just too bad it'll take a thousand centuries with current technology to manufacture the billion tons of carbon fiber needed manufacture the elevator... sigh... I was looking forward excitingly to the long ride to space, accompanied by a nice Muzak rendition of Michael Bolton's finest... hmmph...
We get what you're saying, something about paranoia -- but this story reminds you of fiction in which NASA faked the moon landings and is involved in a murderous, high-stakes coverup involving murdering astronauts?
Um, maybe you want to call Fox and tell them you've got a new investigative special... Or did they run that one?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
Wouldn't this require more complex in-orbit acrobatics to join the cargo and crew craft? (And then of course to detach for re-entry.) It seems to me that the more maneuvering would be required (which is potentially quite error-prone, even with computers handling it) the more risk is increased. Furthermore, you now have twice the number of flight systems to handle.
Please, correct me if I'm wrong, but this seems like a step backwards.
Join Tor today!
I suggested this back in March
Your forgetting the saturn 5's were insanely expensive.
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
keeps moderating my post off-topic?
What will Fry do for a job????
There's a growing sense that even if The Future comes,
most of us won't be able to afford it.
-- Lemmy
The quote at the beginning of the article
is damning for an organization that NASA is supposed to be.
NASA should be a research and development organization. The job of such organizations is to learn new things and teach the rest of us. The fact that they're not learning from their mistakes shows an organization that's become mired in incompetence.
This is one consequence of the rigid, hierarchical nature of today's NASA. Rigid hierarchies resist change and learning. They're great if you want to keep doing the same thing the same way. For instance, if you want to keep on making buggy whips in the same way to the same standards as your great grandfathers, adopt this kind of organization. Oh, you want to switch from buggy whip making to rocket research? Time to scrap the rigid hierarchy.
"Beer is proof God loves us and wants us to be happy." -- B. Franklin
Getting into outer space isn't that hard. The problem lies in designing ships and rockets that can get into outer space and _come back_. If we just leave out that last part, the design process becomes much easier and the costs much lower. All this concern over coming back down is just so much balderdash. I bet if you polled all the astronauts and would-be astronauts, the great majority would prefer to just stay out there. Just strap a big can on top of the rocket with some acceleration couches and you're all set.
---- El diablo esta en mis pantalones! Mire, mire!
They partially destroy themselves when they land. You'd essentially have to rebuild the thing from scratch to make it space worthy. Cheaper prospect than the refurbishment the space shuttle requires, but you're still stripping it down to it's frame and rebuilding it. As it is now, Russia can barely keep up with demand for the ones they're using. They're making them as quickly as they can afford to, and it's as much the construction time on the soyuz/progress capsules as anything else, that dictates their launch tempo.
And rebuilding the Shuttle's engines, tiles and more after every launch isn't?
...not just an environmentalist mantra anymore.
Now, the shuttle tried to reuse and the expense of reduction and recycling. Maybe this is another "pick any two" scenario... maybe not.
At any rate, it would be interesting to see the situation analyzed in terms of an optimal balance between these 3 environmental goals.
By not having astronauts on every mission, you REDUCE resources used. When you need to lanuch astronauts, you could continue to REUSE spacecraft. Heck, maybe now we will see some truly exciting reusable spacecraft based on public-private partnerships. Beefed-up X-prize winner, perhaps? Anybody remember the sadly canceled Dynasoar program, or for that matter the X-15?
Those were all exciting, and potentially cost-effective techniques for putting people into space, but the all-in-wonder Space Shuttle sucked away resources that could have been used to develop them.
If they go capsule, what says you have to throw away the whole capsule anyway? I mean, obviously you melt down and RECYCLE the metalic parts of the capsule, but control panels and other complex and costly components within the capsule could be flown on many missions, and should be REUSED.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Well, well, well, the great NASA has finally figured up what the Russians had figured up 3 deacades earlier: for people, for ressuply, for heavy loads, &c.
Better late than never, I guess.
But not good enough for the 2 whole NASA shuttle crews blown to bits, though (where they 15 people?).
``L'imagination au povoir.''
Firstly anything in such low orbits as the ISS gets "quickly" pulled back into the atmosphere and is burned up. Manmade "space rain" is also miniscule in comparison to the amount of other space debris that falls into the atmosphere on a daily basis. Go outside on any clear night and look up at the sky, you will see 2-4 good size shooting stars an hour easy! Now multiply that by thousands you don't see and millions of particale too small to see anyway and you get close to the "tons" of stuff being ground up by the atmosphere daily!
Also there are many kinds of "reusability" issues involved. First a smaller vehicle designed for human transport uses less fuel and less materials in the first place. Second, there is nothing stopping anyone from reusing the internals or even the frame of a capsule or small space plane. Lastly you can recycle metal frame work of capsules...
Separating humans and cargo is a good idea, combining them was a flaw in the requirements for the shuttle IMHO. I'm also not convinced of the need for a "plane", what does it get you and what do you lose?
Obligatory A Space Odyssey reference:
"Open the pod bay door, Hal!"
Its about time that this was considered. I have been suggesting this since the early designs of the shuttles were released. Now all we need to do is get rid of the Buck Rogers spaceship mentality and send people up in capsules with smaller areas to cover and shield from heat. Unmanned cargo ships would also contribute to robotic and autonomous machine technologies which, unlike microgravity research, be of some value to the rest of us Earthbound folks.
Agreed, using the same vehicle for crew and cargo clearly compromises safety and capability for both.
I'm a bit perturbed, though, by the idea that we should go back to launching crew in single-use vehicles a-la 1960. Sure, it would probably be safer than the shuttle, but (and I'm getting tired of hearing it) safety should not be NASA's primary goal. If you want safety, stay home already. Safety as an open-ended goal cannot be satisfied; it is both a money sink and a rhetorical ace-up-the-sleeve. Witness the current "safety from terrorism" efforts.
Part of NASA's reason for being is to advance the state of the art for the public benefit; redeploying fourty year old technology won't do that. The purpose of the Mercury and Gemini projects were to make mistakes and learn from them, to eventually culminate in Apollo. The shuttle is the Mercury of reusable ships. Twenty-five years between technology generations is far too long. Let's learn from our mistakes and (with the cargo-carrying requirement dropped as a mistake) build the next generation shuttle already.
Reusable crew vehicles are ultimately preferred, as they have greater inherent capacity for safety than single-use craft. Which flight of an airliner would you rather be on - its 1000th, or its very first?
Launch the cargo on big dumb boosters but develop an elegant, safe way to get people to and from LEO .
.. with the reusable spacecraft not being the safest. If we can go ahead with the spacecraft designs where the vehicle is not blasted off, rather takes off like an airplane, flies to high altitudes, and then starts its rockets to escape the atmosphere, such a plan would be far more safe.
Airplanes and their design have been well tested for over a century now. Rather than strapping people on humungous rockets filled with colossal amounts of liquid and solid fuel, we could send them high in the atmosphere in huge sailplanes and THEN the rockets can be attached to boost further to the outer space. These plans were detailed earlier in Scientific American but even disasters like these cannot shift the current policies enough.
It seems clear some big changes will have to be in place now to 'improve' NASA, but going back to unreusable rockets seems less safe to me. It is just too much explosive fuel too close to people, and it takes enormous amounts of power for the initial liftoff(with many pieces flying off, big temperature and pressure changes, high vibration etc). Attaching rockets in the stratosphere (maybe transported there via other sailplanes) will not require such big rockets, will not require solid fuel rockets and starting rockets on a vehicle already flying at several machs is relatively safe. It might be a little more expensive , more complicated, but then the Columbia wasn't exactly a simple machine either.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
is one where nearly all R&D is already done, and nearly all the components can be purchased off the shelf. I propose a 300 stage multi-booster rocket that uses Estes solid-fuel motors. Sure the specific impulse is low, but the costs savings of just stuffing 3000 cardboard tubes with black powder should not be taken lightly.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
It depends on what information you already have. If you know nothing about the coin beforehand, then it would be very reasonable to suspect that the probability of getting heads is 1, given two heads. (You wouldn't be very confident in that conclusion, on the basis of two heads, but it would be the most likely possibility -- after all, you haven't even seen evidence yet that the coin isn't double-headed.)
On the other hand, if you know that coins tend to be fair, then getting two heads in a row would convince you far less that the probability of heads is 1. You would need many heads to be convinced that it wasn't just a statistical fluke and the coin is really unfair.
This is encapsulated well within the framework of Bayesian statistics, which incorporates your prior assumptions to tell you what the resulting ("posterior") probability of a hypothesis is. If you already strongly believe that the coin is likely to be fair, then you will conclude an unfair coin with far less probability than would someone who has no belief about the coin's fairness, on the basis of the same data. (For a nicely worked example of this, see the text by Sivia.)
Right. The 1:65 ratio is incorporated into the "likelihood", which is the probability that you'll get the sequence of flips you did, given a particular hypothesis about the coin (how fair it is): P(observations | fairness). That is a straightforward deductive calculation.
The question you want to answer, however, is inductive: what is the probability that the coin is fair or unfair, given that you got the sequence of flips you did: P(fairness | observations). This is the posterior "odds" of the coin being fair.
You combine the two with Bayes's law:
P(fairness | observations) ~ P(observations | fairness) P(fairness)
You combine what you can logically deduce about the likelihood of the observations given an assumption about its fairness, with your prior belief about its fairness, to inductively estimate the degree to which the coin is fair.
One of the interesting facts the the CAIB pointed out was that during the Apollo era, NASA was 6% of the federal budget. Now it's 0.1%
A ship carrying nothing but humans is going to be a ship carrying nothing but dead humans very soon.
It goes without saying, almost...
"I'm sorry, you're luggage is on another flight!"
It failed twice.
1. 1967. Soyuz first flight. Parachute entanglement during reentry. The only pilot died.
2. 1972 Soyuz 11 . Airlock failure when decoupling from Salyut space station. The crew of 3 died without oxigen. They did not use space suits in that mission.
This is about simplifying the airframe to make it safer.
It doesn't take an aerospace engineer to work out that the shuttle's back must have incurred some design concessions to allow for its open-lid.
Also less mass can help to make the vehicle safer, you don't need as much fuel to get on orbit and you can use small motors.
But the most important element of reducing the mass is that your inertial on re-entry becomes less, swifter decelleration from orbital speed and less generation of heat on the hull can only help to make a passenger carrying vehicle safer.
NASA is fully aware that a loss of a manned craft is not only a tragedy it is a potential PR disaster
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Which do you think is worth more -- the cargo or the people?
Try to put aside the "value of life" argument for a moment and just look at it economically. The cost of developing an astronaut -- rarity, training, specialized equipment, support staff, life support systems (food, waste removal, oxygen, etc)...
I would wager the average single astronaut is "worth" more than the average satellite.
Come play Moral Decay!
If I remeber correctly, the delta-t argument goes something like this: you have observed an event/situation but have no idea how typical/un-typical your observation could be. But using logic and probability you can say there is a 50% chance that the period during which you saw these events will continue for between 1/3 and 3 times the period of the original observation.
There is a 50% chance that between one and six (yeah, bear with me) additinal shuttles will be destroyed in in the next 5 - 45 years. Unless things at NASA change eg they run out of shuttles.
One of the issues with the current shuttle is that it tried to be the answer to everything. A ship that is designed from the start as only a cargo ship is much easier to build and maintain. Same goes for the human transport. One of the problems with the shuttle is that the miltary made requirements that foreced landings only in the northern hemisphere. This made the shuttle have much more heat and braking requirements that a less restricted ship would not have. Add that to the human requirments and to the payload requests make a ship that is almost impossible to design as something simple. The more complex the craft the more dangerous.
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Non reusable launch craft would be great, build a simple solar furnace in orbit and fuse all left over rocket stages and various space debris into a molten slag to use for micro-meteriod insulation for the ISS. What is left can be watched over buy a guy who wears dirty t-shirts, doesn't shave, smokes a cigar, and has a pit bull named spike.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
If you design a ship to carry humans, you're also going to design it to carry food and water (the latter will likely be needed for radiation shielding on any interplanetary journey, apart from its usual purpose).
What it doesn't need to carry is fuel for the return journey, any rover vehicles and supplies used for the duration of the stay, scientific instrumentation and equipment, construction materials, or anything else that's not strictly necessary for the survival and well-being of the crew.
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Actually they do reglue the tiles. And of course replace the missing ones.
Actually what happened was that the russians didnt have enuff (us) money to outfit the progress with the autodock feature. So they did it by hand and screwed up.
I dont know about the power windows or the power locks tho.
This design, well, something like it was discussed for the Shuttle. The problem is designing and testing TWO aircraft is extremely expensive.
So with the shuttle they decided to take the 'easy' way.
Apparently, mathematically it is possible to build an airplane that flies to the edge of space and then rockets up to low earth orbit. Without having to piggypack. However that task becomes way harder when you have to take up a crew compartment (real heavy) AND cargo. But with just a crew this might be feasable. The problem is, they need something now.
Right now the best thing to do is to build a small spacplane for between 5 and 10 people and stick that on top of a rocket and send cargo with regular rockets.
I am glad this has made headlines, FOR WHEN THIS PROBLEM IS FINALIZED WE WILL HAVE NO MORE PROBLEMS IN SPACE!!!!! Decisions like this shoud be made in days or weeks not months or years. Like Patton said GO,GO,GO,GO,GO,GO,GO,.... Even with numbers irony exist.
I eat my grapes at room temperature, cuz the cold ones hurt my teeth
I think this make a great first step towards the complete Elevator concept.
Dr. Forward and Tethers Unlimited had advanced the idea of the "Rotovator", a spinning tether that orbits such that as teh end of the tether dips down to suborbital height it has a low enough speed that a vehicle could "catch" it and ride it up into orbit.
Is this the "killer app" that will focus NASA and teh X-PRize people on the use of reusable suborbital vehicles to get into space?
"I'm about to drop the hammer and dispense some indiscriminate justice!"
All space development should be halted and all funds should be diverted to antigravity research; antigravity is the only real way forward...
First and foremost, going into space (and we say space we don't mean some tens of kilometers above the Earth!!!) means conditions easy for humans, and gravity is the number 1 condition that must be satisfied...
Secondly, the only realistic way for space flight and reusing vehicles to enter/leave the atmosphere in our own pace!!! and this will only be possible with controlling gravity.
It may seem a little far fetched, and yes, I am a dreamer, but antigravity is what society should push for. It will solve millions of problems. Just imagine all our garbage being driven to the sun!!! flying cars!!! going into and out of space!!! cities on the air!!!
(let's dream a little, shall we ? escapism is good once in a while...)
Make big cheap rockets. Heck, even Jet engines are not that reusable.
This is my sig.
I'd rather see vehicles that could fly back from the space station and return from earth under their own power, perhaps with a reusable fuel source like jet fuel and a scram engine. I imagine it would also need thrusters for space travel and a booster of some sort.
Someone needs to invent impulse drive.
One big thing they might do to make things a lot safer for crews, would be to make the craft have sufficient fuel in reserve to blow off most of it's velocity before re-entry. The extra fuel the shuttle might carry would barely reduce the shuttle's velocity 10%. So a lighter craft will be necessary.
Assuming one switches to a non-reusable launch rocket with about the same lift capacity as the shuttle, you could probably create a craft with an empty weight around 20000kg, carrying about 80000kg of fuel, which ought to be adequate to shed most of the ~7km/sec orbital velocity. Assuming about half of the 20000kg is in the fuel tank and engine section, that leaves 10000kg for the crew capsule. I believe that should be adequate for a four or even eight person capsule.
The main debate after that is whether to put mass into wings and wheels, or do a capsule and parachute approach. Though I've heard good arguments for the former, I think the latter is likely safer overall.
In order to make a parachute as safe and effective as possible, have the crew capsule separate from the fuel tank and engine section after the de-orbit burn. I also think the Russians are smart to go for a dry landing rather than a splashdown. Simplifies and speeds recovering the crew, which can be important if any of the crew needs medical attention. (I've heard the latter as an argument for wings and wheels, allowing the craft to fly to a landing strip - but why can't an emergency team fly to the projected landing site just about as fast?)
Separate cargo and crew are exactly what we need for space missions in the next few decades.
The cargo can fly on a Delta-2 rocket. The crew can take a Ford Expedition from Cape Canaveral to the NASA pavillion at Walt Disney World.
There, they can conduct all their orbital duties in complete safety, while being more accessible to the admiring public than ever before!
(Oops, maybe Disney isn't that safe after all...)
We probably have to accept losing a crew every few years. As a career, being an astronaut is still safer than being a fighter jock. About one in five career fighter pilots is killed in an accident. Ask any Air Force wife how many funerals she went to in the last year.
Why NASA is so concerned about the Single Stage to Orbit config is beyond me. Having a dual stage with two reusable craft HAS to be cheaper than the shuttle now.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Well, duuuuuuuh.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
If the impossible happens, at least one of your assumptions is wrong. If the highly improbable happens, one or more of your assumptions may be wrong.
Winning 10 times out of 200 tickets on "a million to one" probability would in fact lead any competent diagnostician to conclude that the probability is not in fact one in a million but closer to 1 in 20. The flaw is assuming that the probability is one in a million.
Finally, two fatal accidents in the shuttle program may not be a sufficiently large sample to make generalizations from, but the likelihood that the probability of failure is "a million to one" is itself not probable.
-Hope
In a fair system, the next throw will be even probability for heads. All indications however suggest that this is probably not a fair system, and the odds are not even.
Chances of 10 heads in a row in a fair system are 1 in 1024. Since the throws are past-tense and known fact, there remains a 1023 in 1024 (99.9%) chance that the system is rigged.
Think about it.
-AC
- Correct: "There is water in this glass." Incorrect: "There are water in this glass."
Here is proper usage for nouns which do not describe set plurality.Correct: "There is data on this disk." Incorrect: "There are data on this disk."
- Incorrect: "There is toys in this box." Correct: "There are toys in this box."
And finally, for singular items...- Correct: "There is a toy in this box." Incorrect: There are a toy in this box."
This English lesson is over. Kono eigo no juugyou ga owarimasu.-GN (grammar ninja)