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NASA Plans Discovery Launch May 15
Haxx writes "More than two years after losing the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew, NASA said Friday it has set May 15 as its target date for once again launching shuttles into space." Reader gollum123 writes points out Reuters's version of the story, which says that "May 15 was chosen as the launch date for Discovery and its seven-member crew because of lighting conditions and thermal issues related to the shuttle's launch and docking at the International Space Station."
They fired all of the engineers and outsourced to India.
The sooner we can finish off our commitment to the ISS, the sooner we can focus on the next generation of transports. Ones that are cheaper to operate and can take advantage of all the stuff we've developed in the last 10 years instead of having the astronauts take laptops with them because its cheaper than removing the outdated computers currently in the shuttle.
The article says that Atlantis is being prepped simultaneously for a possible rescue mission. I doubt it actually be on the other pad when Discovery launches, but how realistic is it for NASA to set up another launch on two weeks' notice?
Give a man fire, and you warm him for the night. Set a man on fire, and you warm him for the rest of his life.
Russia can't handle the ISS. The shuttle is the only vehicle that can handle lifting the larger parts of the station. Russia can only resupply and and lift small items for the ISS. Until the shuttles get back into it, ISS constuction is on hold.
I'm somewhat frightened by the prospects of this and future launches. I have a friend who works at NASA, and he was telling me the other day about the "mandatory changes" list that NASA had implemented; basically, a list of things that had to be finished before the next launch.
He said that what started as a daunting list started shrinking as items were eliminated or down-played due to budget or time contraints. It started with small things, but as pressure was put on NASA to launch again, bigger and bigger items began taking on secondary or even non-existant importance.
The bottom line: this shuttle is launching with things that should have been fixed not fixed at all. What's scary to me is that this is the same situation that resulted in both previous shuttle explosions: problems that were known about but downplayed as unimportant. As history tells us, this was hardly the case, resulting in the loss of two shuttles.
My friend's analysis of the situation fits with some of the studies done on the NASA disasters; NASA should be allowed to do its job without budget or political pressure, for without this they can assure the safety of the people sent into space on their vehicles.
Unfortunately, this will likely never happen, and even the most brilliant of designs will be rushed out the door or underfunded. Tragic, really.
I should probably submit this as a seperate story but I'm too lazy. Here's a quote from a story at DigitalJournal.com to remind us what NASA originally promised:
"David Aiken, an associate professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Maryland, worked at the Kennedy Space Center soon after the shuttle program was approved in 1972.
He believes that in hindsight the reusability aspect of the Space Shuttle was grossly overestimated.
'Actually the original mission model had 500 missions in ten years for a fleet of five orbiters. Every orbiter was going to fly every two weeks. The idea was that it would land, you would do 160 hours worth of work on it, that's basically two shifts per day five days a week for two weeks - and then you'd be back on the launch pad ready to launch again,' he says. 'Now it's turned out that it doesn't take 160 hours of time to turn it around again, it probably takes more like 3,000 hours of time.'"
Yeah, yeah, I know all about all of the unknowns that they faced. The pioneers are the ones who get arrows in their chests. But this is ridiculous.
I remember NASA experts and PR flacks saying so glibly how using expendable rockets was like driving across the country and throwing away the car after every trip.
Yeah and maybe shooting a gun is like throwing a really tiny knife and leaving it in the target.
Maybe rocketships aren't like cars. Maybe we would have been way, way better off in terms of cost--and probably human lives--if we had stayed with expendables.
Insert witty sig here.
I think most in the USA have a "been there, done that" attitude towards our human spaceflight programs. Sure, the space station is supposedly laying the foundation for future manned exploration missions, but right now, all we're essentially doing is a repeat of the 1980s. Weren't they doing 0 gravity experiments back then too? And what do we have to look forward to? Mr. Bush's plans to boldly return where we went 40 years ago? And after that grow some money trees so we can somehow get to mars?
Unmanned spaceflight has made great strides and clearly had a far, far greater impact on the public's love of space than our boring, so-tired manned spaceflight program. It's time to get creative, or else leave the mission to the robots.