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New Shuttle Fuel Tanks Ready
confusion writes "NASA has completed the redesigned fuel tanks for the Shuttle scheduled to for launch in May or June of this year.
"On the new tank, NASA has reconfigured the struts and fittings where foam was prone to peeling off, and installed heaters to prevent ice from forming. The new tank has cameras that will allow ground workers to monitor for damage as the shuttle ascends.""
The main problem on the antiquated space shuttles is the heat-resistant tiles. They're extremely expensive, and not very good. They're so soft you could problably crush a piece with your hands, which means they're easily damaged during flight (and we've seen the fatal results of that).
Troy Hurtubise, the Canadian who did the famous bear-proof suit documented in the movie Project grizzly, spent 18 years researching how to make a flameproof material, and finally has it. It's far more heat-resistant than the space shuttle tiles, far more durable, and far cheaper. A friend and I watched him testing it for a military representative last July, and got the whole thing on film (it was so interesting we hope to turn it into a documentary). His material would solve many of the space shuttle safety issues, and do it for cheap (and he has an impact-proof version as well, which provides a cheap way to prevent many of the deaths of soldiers in Iraq; that was the focus of the testing I saw).
Here's his site:
http://projecttroy.com.nexx.com/website/
The new tank has cameras that will allow ground workers to monitor for damage as the shuttle ascends
What are they gonna do about it when it is damaged from the ground?
Also, stop using the International Space Station because it can't get us to the moon, mars, or anywhere, and it is too expensive. It also has no scientific gain since it takes a full time crew working just to keep the thing from crashing into the ocean, exploding, or something else.
Are they going to send one of the astronauts on an EVA walkaround inspection before re-entering this time? Truckers check their brakes before a big hill, why don't astronauts check the heat shield?
They've known about this problem for 20+ years. "But we never lost any important tiles." NOW they decide it's time to do something about the chunks of ice. If you needed any more evidence that NASA was a haven of groupthink, bureaucracy, and institutional cowardice, here it is.
Behold the riant ape! Beware, his crooked thumbs!
Is it just me? But it does seem like while nasa did do something to alleviate the causes of a crash, it has done nothing to improve the design/engineering/materials etc used in the shuttle.
Not very wise isn't it? It's just like the modern drugs we see these days that reduces symptoms but doesn't cure the cause.
Online backup with Mozy, sounds like Ozzie, but more!
That's one scenario.
There are multiple abort scenarios if one or more of the main engines cut out. These scenarios can be modified to deal with significant tile damage. The orbiter will not have orbital velocity if one of these aborts were called, and so the tile system will be much less crucial.
The problem, of course, is that any damage will need to be assessed rapidly. The earlier in the launch an abort can be called, the more options there are.
Some of the abort scenarios have the shuttle gliding over an ocean and bailing out. There's a pole they would slide along to make sure they clear the orbiter. So, in fact, there are scenarios where the crew would be told to jump out.
Far better if the shuttle can land at one of the designated landing sites around the globe. Even there, NASA will have fun returning the orbiter to the United States.
If the abort cannot be called in time, then the shuttle would continue on to the ISS. Docked with the ISS, there would be a chance to a) review how bad the damage is and b) wait until another shuttle or Soyuz could be launched.
If the shuttle does make it to orbit and is damaged, recovery of the shuttle would be problematic. So far, there is no way to repair the shuttle in orbit.
The shuttle still needs a human to activate some landing systems, so the shuttle cannot be sent back on a "hope it makes it back, too bad if it doesn't." If I remember correctly, that little design screwup was actually promoted by the astronauts. Job security.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
The very last call I took at the IBM PC Help Center [which, I gather, is in peril of being relocated from the RTP to the PRC] was with the guy who administered the laptops that the astronauts took on the shuttle. Could only see about 100 of the 300 servers on his network, so we figured it was a networking problem [I was in networking, not laptops], and I spent three hours with him before we finally realized that it was the drivers for the PCMCIA bridge that were killing the ethernet stack. Updated the drivers and la voila - everything worked perfectly.
ANYWAY, this was early 1997, and he told me that the shuttle was filled with 8-bit processors dating from its design in the 1970s, and it was cheaper for them to have the astronauts carry light weight IBM laptops onboard as a form of an upgrade rather than ripping the beast apart at the seams and upgrading all those 8-bit processors to 32-bits [which I suppose nowadays would be 64-bits].
Wonder who they'll use for such sensitive equipment now that Big Blue has jumped in bed with Big Red?
Yep, NASA has an entire book available on their site documenting the building of the space shuttle. The Space Shuttle actually would have been much more advanced and safer then it is right now. But, Congress had given NASA a strict budget, and NASA had to build a space shuttle with the budget they had at the time which was if I remember correctly was around 1.2billion.
:-/
Considering some of the better designs needed nearly 4billion to be built, 1.2billion was way too little
NASA's Shuttle Fleet was supposedly state of the art in the 1980s, although half the posts in this thread will tell you that perhaps they weren't built that well back then. The point is, why are they trying to correct the flaw in such an antiquated vehicle? The Space Shuttles are 20 years old; they belong in museums, not space.
Exactly. And while it's heavier, its increased tensile strength, especially at high temperatures, means you get a greatly improved payload fraction. And since you have a much simpler thermal protection system, maintainance is greatly reduced. And, since titanium doesn't fatigue nearly as badly as aluminum, it'll last longer. The economics of a reusable titanium craft are just beautiful.
Titanium isn't as costly as it used to be (and if any of the contiuous-process production methods start to come online, its price could even approach that of aluminum). The FCC Cambridge Process looks really encouraging; they discovered, somewhat accidentally, that you can actually do electrolysis directly on titanium oxide instead of having to have it completely dissolved first. The process will hopefully make various other expensive alloying metals cheaper as well, and possibly even allow for the creation of some new superalloys that have not been possible previously.
Seen on a Japanese food processor: "Not to be used for the other use."
The primary computers on the shuttle were, in the beginning, three "hardened" IBM 360 mainframes. The 360 used 8 bit bytes, and 32 bit "words", the smallest addressable unit. That said, Im sure that some of the auxiliary systems use smaller CPUs. As cool as they are, Thinkpads havent ever been used for critical systems. The reason why they use laptops to do word processing and note taking isnt because they cant upgrade their 1970s era electronic word processors, but because their 1970s word processors were paper and pen.