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Shuttle Fleet Upgraded
angel'o'sphere writes "Space.com reports that the shuttle fleet will be upgraded with more technology, like new sensors to detect debris hits on the wings, etc. Also, the foam causing the Columbia accident (intended to insulate the tank and prevent the formation of ice) will be replaced by: heaters. I wonder if heating up a tank with liquid oxygen is a bright idea."
They blow it again and its over. Frankly I am not worried about them actually performing the technology based changes, those are easy. I do not see them making the administrative changes. Oh I see new glossy surface polishing, but underneath what will really change.
The is Government, they weren't accountable when Challenger blew up, and I doubt anyone was held truly accountable for Columbia.
Ditch the damn shuttle. All it does is hamper any possibility of real space usage. It is nothing more than a modern day spruce goose. It has so many things that can go wrong something will. I don't know if the nation has the stomach to lose another 7, and I don't want to find out.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
This is just avoiding what many people see as the obvious conclusion: the space shuttle in its current incarnation needs to be replaced. It was designed before I was born.
Unfortunately it looks like NASA is moving in the wrong direction, cutting the funding from their shuttle replacement project. Of course, I'm all for making the existing shuttles safer, and what they're doing now is a good idea.
WARNING: If accidentally read, induce vomiting.
The Shuttle launch complex at Vandenberg AFB, SLC-6, was built with heaters originally. Had 39B at Kennedy been so equipped, there is a good chance the Challenger tragedy would never have ocurred. Of course, no Shuttle ever launched from Vandenberg and SLC-6 was abandoned in place. There was a particularly haunting photo that was floating around the web back in the 90s showing SLC-6 sitting there all rusted out (I googled but couldn't find it). I believe SLC-6 has since been rebuilt to fly Atlas-Centaurs.
"or doubling the size of the current ISS (into something useful) in ONE THROW"
Um... no, think about it for a moment. That won't work unless you can collapse all those parts as if they were empty cardboard boxes and then re-assemble in orbit. I doubt many of the big workhorse rocket designs ever lift close to their true capacity - the awkwardness of the payload (in terms of aerodynamics and balance) is not trivial. And then if you get that to work but require human assembly at the destination, you still need to send people up, except now you're sending them on something else at the same time. Now you've got to manage two spacecraft designs, two coordinated launches, and so on.
While I agree with your general idea (learn from the old stuff and do BETTER), spaceflight hasn't gotten any easier, and upgrades to spacecraft aren't as simple as swapping out a video card and loading new drivers...
(Personally, I think we should try to do everything at once - do better rockets AND build the space elevator. They are different enough projects that they wouldn't steal specialist engineers from each other, thus we could work on both at the same time. If either one works, we win, and if the elevator works we really really really win)