Slashdot Mirror
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."
What do they do every day? They are unlikely to be training for a specific mission at the moment with no shuttle...
Get a free iPod Nano 4GB!
Why is that?
The first shuttle was built in the 70s using decades old know-how. Why has it taken so long to produce its successor?
Is it the technological challenge, or is it just politics that keeps the manned space exploration down?
The owls are not what they seem
Do you really think that we lack the capability to make something that was made in the 1960s? Yes, there might be a large start up cost since many of the tools are no longer in use, but we also have technologies and automation that was unimagined in the 60s.
I have heard this argument time and again - we can't make the parts anymore, we don't know how. I am waving the BS flag on that. I challenge you, or anyone else, to point to a part used on the Saturn V rockets that can no longer be made. I am not saying that it can be made inexpensively or mass produced in a factory, but point to something that absolutley cannot be made.
Also, do you need something made to spec? What size? I'll measure it with my laser. Need to examine it for flaws? I can use my PC and a camera to look it over for you. Need an X-Ray of it? I can do the same thing. Need to check calculations? Forget your slide rule, I've got a TI-92.
In short, I doubt there is anything technologically impossible about creating more Saturn V rockets. I doubt there is even a financial reason it can't be done - NASA declaring they are spending billions to buy a new "fleet" of Saturn V rockets will motivate companies to produce what is needed for a reasonable cost (in most cases). What we really need is the political will to say this is important and we need to fund it.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
Deke Slayton, one of the Mercury Seven and the longtime head of the astronaut corps (i.e., the guy with the final say on flight crew assignments), pushed hard to use an airliner-style crew system for the shuttle. That is, have a small group of pilots and mission specialists that would fly repeatedly together, with one-off payload specialists handling mission-specific duties. He'd seen how frustrating life was for the later '60s astronaut classes that only saw a few members fly, and sometimes not for decades. And this was back when NASA genuinely believed each shuttle would spend as little as two weeks before launching again.
Instead, we got the worst of both words: A launch schedule in which four shuttles did at most a dozen launches a year together, little likelihood of even that annual figure in the three remaining shuttles' lifetimes, and an astronaut corps that numbers in the hundreds with new inductees coming in every two years. That's just crazy.
When somebody mentions the shuttle program ending, I never miss a chance to plug nuclear rockets. I know it's the "N" word, but read this fascinating article detailing a design for a fully reusable, non-polluting rocket ship based on the Saturn-V form factor. Powered by Gas Core Nuclear Reactor engines emitting only non-radioactive hydrogen, the ship would be capable of carrying 1000 Tons of cargo into orbit and returning an equal amount of cargo to a powered landing. For comparison the shuttle's cargo capacity is less than 30 tons.
Now that would be an interesting form of democracy. You vote for politicians to come up with different programs, and then each person gets to vote for where their tax dollars go: a bit like allocating where your 401K money gets invested. The gun nuts can have their tax dollars go to the military, the geeks can have their tax dollars go towards NASA, and the hippies can have their tax dollars go towards environmental protection.
I imagined that there would be a lot of boring, yet essential for a smoothly running country, items that would be almost ignored under such a system.