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Space Shuttle to re-launch in May
Goeland86 writes "CNN reports that NASA is on it's way to prepare for a shuttle launch in may. Considering the damage caused by the Hurricanes this season, I think it's quite impressive that they're even thinking of a launch next year altogether."
IMHO it was never bad engineering, but bad quality management. All the big catastrophes, be it on NASA's or ESA's side, could have caught by a rigorous net of quality management processes. But these net don't seem to exist in either of the two organization, at least not the extent where it makes them find errors.
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The Shuttle is dead...Long live the Shuttle.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
RE: the Columbia - I don't think the QC was missing - I think the QC'ers were suppressed.
They may hate the shuttle but due to the short sightedness of the last few administrations they have no other viable space lift vehicle available. And they have contractual obligations on the International Space Station. The poor Russians (bankrupt as they are) are pulling more than their share and might get fed up soon if NASA doesnt start pulling its weight. After all the Russian part of the ISS is built independently. They can just close the doors and jettison all the US modules.
**Life is too short to be serious**
A lot of those failed attempts could have been avoided if the launch supervisors had just listened to the engineers. There have been times when the engineers are saying that the weatehr is too bad, or that a certain component is questionable for launch.
:-)
Let's not blame the engineers...blame the safety inspectors, or the launch supervisors if we're blaming someone.
Design and architectural engineering can't exist in a vacuum. Quality engineering must be part of the process. Too many times I've winced when NASA screws up. The accountability is terrible.
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The shuttles are nearly thirty years old, from the beginning of development to today. Each launch costs taxpayers nearly 1/2 billion dollars. Isn't there a better alternative? Can't we use technology to our advantage to design inexpensive machines similar to the shuttle? In my mind, the shuttle is comparable to bulky American 70's cars, while what it is really needed is the German Smart Car. Pardon the analogy.
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It's not bad engineering....blame the politicians and bureaucrats behind the scenes saying, "DO IT!" when the engineers are screaming, "NO!". That's why we lost the first shuttle...
Despite the fact that there are many extremely smart and talented people at NASA, it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward. The Space Shuttle, no matter how many times it has been retrofitted, is still 1970s technology. It's hideously expensive to launch and requires a vast support army to operate. But that vast support army is precisely why it exists. The space shuttle exists to serve the International Space Station. The International Space Station exists to be serviced by the space shuttle. Both provide lots of aerospace industry jobs and this is, in fact, their primary function. Turf and caution have become the watchwords at the highest echelons of NASA, who are more concerned with protecting their bureaucratic empire than moving the exploration and colonization of space forward. The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles, something the X Prize has only partially offset. A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony. See any sign of that?
Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
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The shuttles are masterpeices of engineering.... circa 1980. Unfortunatly they invested $$$ in a short production run vehicle that seems to still serve the original purpose. If you were to start building one new replacement it would take a long time and cost big bucks.
If they were to start off with a new design they could apply modern techniques/materials to create a lighter, stronger, more reliable system (i.e. a carbon monocot frame, carbon heat shield skin, computers that have more than 640k of ram, etc)
After working out the kinks on paper they could build a few dozen (price per unit should go down with increased volume) and launch more regularly. But then again, I'm just smoking crack here, NASA will never see that kind of budget again. Unless we can convience the public that Bin Laden is camped out in his secret moonbase.
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Okay peeps:
1) Replacing the shuttle. yes we should. No we haven't. But we've got that great big investment up there called the ISS. Shall we just abandon it? Didn
't think so.
2) 'Disasters' - We've had two. Fewer than the Apollo program. They suck. Really they do. And they have been attributed to the 'make it work anyway' group. Who, I might add, are usually under $$$ pressure from those who are screaming for better "return on investment for the taxpayer". This is still, contrary to popular belief, exploration, and *THINGS WILL HAPPEN* - it is not airflight.
3) 'We should develop -insert your favorite space technology here-', Some of those technologies do need testing in space now.
4) 'what about spaceship-one' - what was the payload capacity? 200kilo? Roughly?
yes, NASA has problems - but contrary to popular belief - we really need the shuttles flying, if only to develop the replacements!
I don't see those options as being mutually exclusive. Temprarily continuing the space shuttle program while a new vehicle is being developed seems to be a good idea. Otherwise, NASA might succumb to pressure to rush the design, and the effects of that seem far more disasterous in my opinion.
NASA has a good record of recovering after a tragedy.
If you take the Apollo program as an example, the very first Apollo mission was a disaster with three astronauts killed. And yet after that, the Apollo missions were great successes (although Apollo 13 was a close call, of course).
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched with a faulty mirror, but this was fixed and Hubble's become a great success, too.
The shuttle program will probably go the same way.
I mean all the pooh-poohing about how old it is and how slow they are to get it running and how in the hell can Burt Rutan build a time machine that in 3 days and all that shit.
Well what's your "Jesus H. Christ this cost so much goddamn money that could be better used elsewhere" plan? How much should a very heavy reusable lifter cost and how complicated should it be?
Rutan didn't orbit, didn't carry a payload, can't dock with anything and at 20 million dollars per 175 pound man launched costs what the Space Shuttle costs.
You obviously know nothing about engineering or politics.
Too many times I've heard many people accuse NASA of not doing good quality management. At the same time, I've heard many people say that NASA costs too much - that they spend too much on everything. Sometimes, they're even the same people.
Well, to be honest, these two issues are largely mutually exclusive. More testing costs more money. The reason that the shuttle is so expensive to launch, for example, is because they put it through such an extensive review (dismantling almost the entire SSMEs for inspection of parts, for example). One can say "Well, they should do (insert person's favorite test here) and omit (insert person's least favorite test here)". However, others among you will insist on just the opposite. Or both. Or neither.
The people at NASA aren't Gods. They don't know in advance which tests will turn out to be important or not. They don't know in advance which sorts of inspections will be important. They have to make choices.
You people can't have it both ways - you can either have more testing/inspection or less, corresponding to more cost or less. Fight amongst yourselves (quality pushers vs penny pinchers), and leave NASA out of it until you've made up your minds.
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But neither does it fund the development of new manned space vehicles. It develops them until they get to a point at which they might threaten the entrenched Shuttle/ISS pork barrel, and then cancels the project.
With shuttle retirement now a reality, maybe this time it'll be different, but I doubt it.
Personally, I'd like to see NASA scrap the ISS and concentrate on unmanned space science, at which they're pretty damn good. Contract out the probe launches to commercial providers, which they're doing now. And have about $3B/year to use in either doing more science or in actually seeing a next-generation project through to completion.
I don't want NASA to "fund joyrides". I want the joyriders to fund themselves. Once that happens, the joyriders will produce other joyriders, because people will be making money in space. The more meat you can put up in orbit, the more of the meat's money you make. The price drops, and someday the scientist-meat can afford to go too. (Much like the scientist-robots are flying commercial, rather than Shuttle, these days.)
NASA's manned programme is a nest of perverse incentives: a space station that does no science, but requires the shuttle, and a shuttle that does no science, and requires a space station. They're both very good at "making money" (in the sense of burning through Congressional appropriations), but so long as the money keeps coming, NASA's manned programme has no incentive either to put meat into space or do science in space.
So yeah, Burt's a hell of a long way from orbit. But because he's motivated by profit (which he doesn't get if he doesn't build SpaceShip Two/Three), and because NASA has no motivation to do anything other than preserve its current bureaucracy, I'd put even money on Burt getting to orbit before the next-generation Shuttle will. If you give me 3:1 odds, I'd even put money on Burt making at least one orbit before the next-generation Shuttle gets off the drawing board.