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ISS Gyro Fixed Via Spacewalk
Teahouse writes "After a failed attempt last week, the ISS Astronauts finally got to fix the external gyroscope circut breaker in the station. Tests are being run today, but it looks like the ISS is back to having attitude stability with redundancy. This is particularly significant with the Shuttle being grounded for an extended period because the ISS would have had to use thruster fuel to keep the Station's solar panels pointed in the right direction without the gyroscopes, and no guarantee when more fuel would be arriving."
I'm sure a lot of people are going to use this malfunction and (necessarily) hazardous repair as an indictment of the current investment in manned, shuttle-based spaceflight.
However, until NASA has a better platform, they will probably continue to use the shuttle.
Perhaps if the open source movement were to desing and implement a shuttle replacement, we might have a working replacement faster than if NASA were told they have to come up with a cheaper faster replacement.
For those thinking of suggesting that Soyuz would work, might I remind you that every Soyuz capsule is a one time use vehicle. Even when everything goes right, it doesn't get re-used. It has no airlock, so either everyone gets suited up, or no-one does a space walk. It has no payload capability, so no sattelite recovery. It has no manipulator arm, so you can't rely upon it for doing sattelite maintenance as the shuttle crew has.
The shuttle may not be perfect. It was designed for a set of missions that have very little to do with what it is doing now. (The military provided some of the specs to support black projects, few of which have ever been attempted.)
The Civilian side of the project was to haul people and material to and from the space station that was being desinged by NASA, which was not the international space station. It was also decided to use it to deploy sattelites as well once the capacity of the payload bay was defined.
As a jeep, the shuttle has done an ok job. If you think we need a better design, I am all for it. Start working on that better desing, and give us status reports as you find the time.
Thank you for your support.
Unfortunately, nobody appears to understand that with the shuttles grounded indefinitely, the International Space Station provides one of the few opportunities for the United States to safely (relatively speaking) evaluate new technology in the precise environment that it must function properly in. Hypotheses and simulation, after all, often differ from reality. And with their newly aggrandized objective to ensure "complete astronaut safety," shouldn't NASA be utilizing every resource in its arsenal?
Do you like German cars?
It's kind of arbitrary speculation to claim that the Bush "Mission to Mars" initiative is "just to give the impression of superiority over the Chinese." The US doesn't define itself relative to China, and only recently quit defining itself relative to Russia. Now, this may be more arbitrary speculation, but I think Bush's Mars initiative has more to do with Reaganesque feel-good-about-America vaporware. Quite frankly, I wouldn't be surprised if the whole thing started on one of Karl Rove's cocktail napkins, which is probably as far as it will ever get.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Personally (and as an American) I think we shouldn't have made the shuttle into what it was. Most engineers without a stake in the profits were very concerned with the design, since it was rather fragile. It was also expensive.
The problem was that the ISS was concieved and built with a dependency on technology, two decades old, with a somewhat troubling penchant for failure.
As for the "moon base", unless Google is going to chip in and fund it, I doubt America will go through with it. The US space program has lost a lot of the "I did it first" impetus it had when it was competing with the Soviet Union, and that could be a good thing. The NASA of today should focus on the practical, useful aspects of space, instead of being used as a political tool by whatever president is in office. I would rather have my tax dollars spent on putting communications/navigation satellites into orbit than have it spent on a moon base with little practical value to me or America.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Gah! I'll bite on this one:
The ISS is not dying of neglect. Far from it. If your computer loses a secondary hard drive to old age and you replace it with a new one, is your computer dying of neglect? No. If a car's tire goes flat and you put on a new one, are you neglecting it? No.
That said, the ISS is the biggest white elephant program going on in space travel at the moment relative to everything else. Actually, they're all pretty undefendable except Hubble. (And, of course, except any other additions to the list that I'm sure people more familiar with NASA will spank me with in the replies) Nothing makes money, and the science-to-spending ratio is obscene compared to most programs. If we had to transfer funding away from these projects specifically for... oh, let's say, education, cancer research, or domestic security (this is HYPOTHETICAL! No flame here, I know what our war budgets and football stadium budgets are, I'd NEVER advocate cutting NASA before those things)... then most people would never argue the loss of the projects. They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't think twice either.
Besides, the entire point of these risky, socially purposeless, complicated, budget-eating manned space missions is basically to do more things big and showy to pat ourselves on the back as a species. In that sense, Mars would be a greater success than the ISS. We've never been to another planet, but we've already done the orbital-sardine-can trick.
Pretty soon, robotics and remotely-operated mechanical systems will eliminate the need for a human presence on many science missions, so the cost of science should decline rapidly. This will be excellent. As for the manned missions... well, if we get into the space tourism game or we privatize some elements of the various programs, things may improve. For now, we do what we can, and we're in a tough spot. We've always recovered from disaster and tragedy in space travel, and we shall do so again.
character_assassin, you may be right, but personally I think the Bush administration is scared poopless of the Chinese. It's the most populous nation on earth. It can do basic, medium and even some high-tech manufacturing for a fraction of the price to do so in the US. And here's the kicker -- last year foreign investment in China exceeded foreign investment in the US. THAT IS HUGE.
If that doesn't hit you like a slap in the face, think about it this way... When people or companies make it rich around the world, what do they do? They invest their money. And for decades they have put that investment into US companies, knowing their investment was safe. Last year, more people chose to safely tuck their money away in China than in America. I think China/US relations will continue to become a major issue on the world scene, and I think China has only begun its 21st-century ascendency.
Maybe I'm wrong, but I believe the US is in an overt economic and political struggle with the People's Republic.