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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."
Hey NASA, I suggest you contact this guy named Burt Rutan. Apparently he's pretty good at putting together elegant solutions for a relatively low cost.
WURD!!
It's amazing how far we've come in the past 36 years. We were once going to the moon, now we can't even go to space! We need to get up there, no matter how we get there. Be it spaceshipone, or the shuttles, or something new. What NASA really needs to do is stop canceling all the good ideas for vehicles. They'll let the planning and testing go on for 8+ years and then nothing comes out of it.
They need to move to the private sector where there are still some with the balls to boldly go...
Nasa is defunct and crippled, if it were a pet we'd put it out of its misery!
It's our money they spend, and it's not meant for their personal pleasure.
With all their paid training they've received, they're perfect for landing jobs in the private sector. In the last year, we've seen a huge initiative for private ventures to go into space. Who better to be the vehicles' operators than existing astronauts? Throw in some stock options, and I think they'd do quite well for themselves. Richard Branson wouldn't hesitate to hire them, not just for their experience but also for the PR value it would have.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
My cousin got offered a place is the Space Program. He choose to design satelittes rather than the astronaut position. (Better money, and he later went to the private sector. Obviously he is not a geek... :)
These are highly trained and educated individuals, I am sure they being employed gainfully...
1. scrap current plans
2. buy Soyuz rockets from the Russians
3. invest the billions you save out on other projects like lunar colonies, exploration drones and advanced propulsion systems.
...is that there isn't much need for Astronauts in our new service-based economy, so they're gonna have a hell of a time finding a new job
Well, then there hasn't been a need ever, if that's how you look at it. But try this instead: these are some of the smartest, most physically and intellectually hardy, well-rounded people on the planet. Every one of them is better equipped to teach than most teachers, better able to fly than most pilots, better able to handle stress than most soldiers/firefighters/police, better able to understand and work with complex systems than most engineers... somehow I think that someone with those skills is hardly going to be working at, well, Disney's Space Mountain ride. There are plenty of systems engineers I know making six figures that would love to have one of these folks as a boss. Just the aerospace defense area alone could gobble up the entire astronaut-trained team in any one month's hiring cycle.
Now... does holding analysis review meetings quite measure up to flying to the moon? No. Does grading orbital mechanics term papers have quite the same panache as shrieking into LEO with a billion dollar payload? No. Is my job boring? Most of the time. They'll deal with it just fine.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why not? Current commies (China) make almost all our clothes, our toys, our machines....
The postponement could be due to past fatalities that occurred, including the 2003 incident. Maybe NASA has to develop a new machine for flight.
m
1 February 2003; Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107), over northeast Texas: Columbia was in the re-entry phase of flight after a 16-day mission and its intended destination was the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Communications with the shuttle were lost at about 9 a.m. local time. At the time of the most catastrophic phase of the breakup, the spacecraft was at an altitude of about 203,000 feet (approx. 39 mi. or 63 km) and was traveling at about mach 18 (roughly 12,500 mph or 20,000 kph). While most of the debris landed in northeast Texas and western Louisiana, especially the area around the town of Nacagdoches (Knack-a-doe-chess), the breakup very likely began further west, possibly before the spacecraft passed over California. All seven astronauts on board the spacecraft were killed. The crew members were:
Michael Anderson (STS-89), David Brown,
Kalpana Chawla (STS-87), Laurel Clark,
Rick Husband (STS-96), William McCool, and Ilan Ramon.
http://www.airsafe.com/events/space/astrofat.ht
yes, but without budget.. no dice.
stupid management yes, mostly just about being shortsighted because of not having money. they've had dozens of plans for a replacement, but without budget to order one they remain as concepts.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I'm a much bigger fanboy for robotic space exploration, and not much of an advocate of the shuttle program. (Nixon basically pimped the shuttle by exaggerating how cost effective it could be, in a spectacular example of how much government largesse the 'Publicans are capable of when the military industrial complex stands to benefit. IMHO, of course.) That doesn't keep me from sympathizing with astronauts who are, by all accounts, pretty impressive people.
Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a weakness.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
a) I actually doubt they could build another, like the Saturn V rockets
b) Much of the cost of building something like this is figuring how to build the parts to spec, and chances are, they don't have the tooling in place anymore
c) The only thing the current shuttles have problem is that it is too complex and too costly to send on missions.
While politically impossible, it would be far cheaper to buy launches from the Russians to put these guys into space.
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
See what I've been reading.
"The space shuttles that NASA have are almost at the end of their lifetimes "
This isn't quite right. The remaining shuttle fleet isn't even to the halfway point of its life expectancy. In other words, the flight-hours remaining on the airframe is greater than 50%.
Yes, we could use a more advanced vehicle, with less risk and more efficiency. But let's not go spreading rumors - the shuttle fleet is actually not old, the design is.
kulakovich
I wonder if the two dead crews would consider themselves lucky?
I know that comment was supposed to be a crass and cynical joke. However, given we all are going to die anyway; who is luckier someone who just dies, or someone who dies while working towards a goal they believe is worthwhile?
The point is that it's going to be hard to maintain a pool of qualified astronauts if they have no incentive to train for it because of no chance to actually go into space. You don't just pick these guys out a few months before launch.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yes, I'm sure you'd be saying "Thank God for space debris" if you were one of the family members of the crew who died. It certainly was convenient for them to die to save you some money.
Oh, wait, did it save you money? Let's look at this... $600,000,000 to launch (I'll take your number because I'm too lazy to look it up). There are about 100,000,000 taxpayers in this country, so assuming two launches per year, you have saved yourself $12/year. Go buy that new car you've been lusting over with that. 12 fucking dollars, man, and you are bitching! Maybe buying two subs from Subway is more important than a bunch of scientific research, but we won't debate that. The annual budget of NASA is 16 billion, which comes out to $160/year/taxpayer for EVERYTHING they do (satellites, mars missions, aerodynamics research, plasma physics, etc). The WEEKLY budget of the Iraq war is 5 billion, and that is just the Iraq war not all of the defense dept.
Even if you'd rather save the $12/year to not launch, did you even think what it costs to research the failure and fix the issues? The return to flight costs were around 1.2 billion (that included all the research into the accident and all the new testing and procedure development). They haven't launched in two years and only had three launches planned in that time, so you saved all of $3/year. Woooooo!
And astronauts have real jobs when they aren't flying. Some are doctors, some are plasma physicists, some are just normal engineers doing research. They aren't always training for a new mission; they are using their single paycheck to do a normal engineering job until it is time to train and fly.
IANAL, but I play one on
Uh, first, we have to have private spacecraft. Burt Rutan's project is about at the level of the second Mercury flight, which was suborbital.
Not to mention 40 years in the past.
The private sector still has a lot of work to do before it can really play with the big boys (in this case, government space agencies). It will catch up, but it's kinda like saying you're ready to start carrying passengers between New York and Tokyo because you can fold a piece of paper and make it fly. You may have re-discovered for yourself the principles of flight, but it takes a bit more expertise and experience than that to do anything meaningful with it. You're not quite ready to challenge Boeing or Airbus if all you've got are paper airplanes.
A lot of people fail to appreciate the difference between what Rutan has done and what world government space agencies (not just NASA) do every day. It's not just about rocketing a guy to the edge of space and back again. It's about getting meaningful work done, which means the ability to carry large payloads to precise areas in orbit, then make it back again to a precise area on the ground. When you start talking about orbiting the Earth 100 miles up with a payload of 40,000 pounds, then you've got all sorts of issues to deal with. The private sector hasn't even started tackling those issues yet.
Luckily, NASA and other space agencies have done most of the work for them already. But that doesn't mean they won't have to re-learn and experience everything for themselves - it just hopefully won't take quite as long to do it.
(btw, this is not to take away from what Rutan has done - it was a great accomplishment. But it needs a sense of perspective - there is still a ton of work to do, and what NASA does is different by an order of magnitude.)
Could we duplicate a 1972 Pinto? Not a look alike, with a better motor and suspension, but an actual duplicate 1972 Pinto. Sure. But at a cost of 5x the original. Finding that 5x is the problem.
"This *is* a space program isn't it? I mean, when you have a manned space program there will be times when people go into SPACE, right?"
"I hate that man..."
The X-33/Venturestar program is a poster-child for the first outcome. NASA sunk 8 years and $200M+ into that program, and never even managed to get a flying half-scale demonstrator. Why? Because at the outset of the program they selected a vaporware Lockheed Martin concept that involved all sorts of sporty technology, rather than go with a more conervative design that might have actually stood a chance of working (like, for example, the Delta-Clipper program, which had already managed to produce a flying half-scale demonstrator in 2 years, on a 1/4 of the X-33's budget).
The Orbital Space Plane is a good example of the second outcome. Everyone was excited about it for a while, and then all of a sudden capsules are the rage and OSP gets replaced with the CEV. Not that I'm saying capsules are bad (I actually prefer them), just that there's a lot of flip-flopping as far as preferred approaches to spaceflight.
It'll be interesting to see which way the CEV ends up going. Based on what I've seen of the requirements documents so far, I'm going to guess the second outcome, since NASA is already over-constraining the solution space (e.g. "thou shalt land using a parachute"). Once everyone gets a new favorite way to do space then the over-specified CEV program will be dropped, and a new program with different requirements will be instituted.
NASA has completly blown the chances for any average person to go into space (Space Ship One can take people in space for 20 million... imagine what could have happened if NASA actually invested billions into low cost civilian access to space, instead of providing corporate welfare to large aerospace companies).
So a few elite government employees will not be able to make it into space? Well, welcome to the world of the rest of us!
You can mark this a Troll, but this is not. Why should we feel bad about the ambitions of government employees that are supposed to be serving us? Especially when they have taken so much of our money, and failed us so badly?
Amen to this comment; the US military/space programs could do well to emulate the Russian design philosophy. Make things simple, rugged, and easily replaceable. I'm surprised Russia doesn't do more PR about how they are basically holding the ISS together.
"Lack of technical competence coupled with the arrogance of power, as usual, leads to no good end."