Astronauts Face Bleak Odds For Spaceflight

Abhishek writes "According to a Space.com report, Astronauts at NASA fear that they won't be able to fly until 2015 and that, for some, would be too late. The space shuttles that NASA have are almost at the end of their lifetimes and any shuttle can take years to be built. Though almost everybody is involved in some way or another in looking after a shuttle, only a lucky few actually gets the chance for a ride."

Comments

Re:Begs the question...

[Dashing Leech]

"What do they do every day?"

Most of them have other jobs at NASA when not in prep for a flight, such as running a lab, program manager for a particular system, performing various analyses or engineering work, etc., plus all the PR (trips to schools, educational programs). Basically their technical/leaderhship skills are used within the program.

Well, if they want to go into space they can always take one of the new private rides which will probably get them there faster than 2015, though not for as long a stay.

Re:hmm

[JeffTL]

You don't need the future tense. Without the Shuttle, when we send someone to the ISS, we already have to let the Russians do the transportation.

Re:Begs the question...

[paranode]

Suppose there is not another space shuttle built by the time some of these astronauts retire. It is given then, that these astronauts will never fly again and should be fired.

That is begging the question. ;)

2 jobs

[YrWrstNtmr]

"Although flying in space is the highlight of an astronaut's career, little time is actually spent in orbit. In fact, during a 10- year assignment with NASA, an astronaut will probably fly in space only three times. There is much more to being an astronaut than time spent in orbit. An astronaut's ground duties can be broken down into two major categories: training for space flight and serving as a technical expert in some portion of the space shuttle or space station programs. "

Excerpt from RedNova

Re:Begs the question...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Burning fuel to carry all that weight to the edge of the atmosphere when you can fly it to the edge of the sky and launch it from there is pretty dumb..."

Getting into space is more complex than flying an airplane up to 63 miles and jumping out. To go into orbit you need to achieve a speed of about Mach 25 (Spaceship 1 was nowhere even close to orbital velocity). Rocket technologies today make sense in accomplishing this by minimizing the weight of the spacecraft and maximizing the weight of the fuel. To do what you want would require that almost all of the fuel and useful spacecraft are carried in an aircraft to perhaps 100,000 feet. The fuel to do so would be enormous and you would still have to fire the rocket to get the other Mach 24 or so. The complex airoframe required to pull this off would probably require a significantly larger amount of fuel that is used today. The losses a rocket has from atmospheric drag at high velocities (up to about 100,000 feet to be equivalent) would be vastly smaller than the fuel required to launch a standard airplane assisted rocket launch.

On a side note, a scramjet may be useful in the future due to its small engine size (extremely few parts). In this scenario a rocket would launch from the ground up to Mach 1, the scramjet would accelerate up to Mach 15, and then another rocket would accelarate up to Mach 25 for orbit or escape. Considering that no space launch has ever used a scramjet, I don't think its fair to call existing technologies 'dumb'. But then again, when has anyone considered 'rocket scientist' to be a synonymn for 'intelligent engineer'?

Re:Begs the question...

[Rei]

Too good of a post to have posted as AC. :)

What the parent needs to realize is how tough it is to scale up rockets to orbital, because you have to invest more and more of your energy into accelerating your fuel. It is quite possible, in theory, to get a moderate cargo to orbit from air launch (tow-launch, drop-launch, or carry-launch) if you use very high ISP engines and a very low mass craft. However, if you don't, your ability to just drop from an aircraft quickly becomes untenable; even a Cossack couldn't carry, say, a scaled-up SpaceShipOne.

The real benefit from air launch, BTW, is not the altitude, but the fact that you don't have to plow through the atmosphere as much and don't have the problems associated with having your engines firing right near the ground (which is more likely to damage them). And ramjets would be great; unfortunately, we cancelled the program because of the premature Mars mission spending :P We need a good workhorse before we commit those kinds of resources to Mars.