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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."
What do they do every day? They are unlikely to be training for a specific mission at the moment with no shuttle...
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...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.
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!!
Don't mistake my sarcasm for flamebait, but does this then mean that ex-commies will have to ferry our capitalist asses to space?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
OK, more seriously, I think the era of NASA is in decline and the era of private spacecraft is in ascent. Some of those astronauts may yet fly, but they might have to retire from NASA to do it.
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!
... astronauts serve other duties at NASA.
They help with planning and ground support for other missions, help with long-term planning, and serve other tasks often depending on their pre-astronaut background.
Currently, there are some working on the Crew Exploration Vehicle and Moon/Mars plans.
It's our money they spend, and it's not meant for their personal pleasure.
They should apply to the privatized space flight companies. I'm betting they'll have a better chance to to get into space with them than NASA.
The space program doesn't exist for their personal egos. There are a heck of a lot of things I'd like to do but will never get the chance, and it doesn't merit a /. story.
Didn't NASA realized that their shuttles were becoming obsolete? Shouldn't they already be building to next shuttle in order to avoid 15-year downtimes?
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.
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If you could get ten cents on the dollar for the $90 billion International Space Station you could keep manned space flight going for some time.
Why does this make me want to cry instead of laugh?
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
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.
The current design is proven, it's not like they'd have to go through the whole design process/testing again.
Just order the same parts, new, and put them all together.
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
When my fourth grade teacher asked me what I want to be when I grow up, I told her, "I want to be an ASTRONAUT Mrs. King". She told me I could do it, if I apply myself. Never before have I been as grateful for chronic drug abuse and not living up to my potential as I am today. It's not like the title says, "Network Tech's Face Bleak Odds for Hooking up Patch Cables"
Maybe they could jump ship and try for one of the proposed manned space programs in other countries. The pilots and engineers shouldn't have a problem finding jobs in the private sector as it begins to take off (no pun intended) since there will be a need for people who know how to get a hunk of metal moving at 7km/s on the ground in once piece. The scientists and other mission personal would have trouble finding spots in the private sector unless it becomes profitable. This would require something like feasible zero-gee engineering that NASA has always been looking at. Maybe one of the big biotech or chemical companies would pay for a science team to spend some time in orbit to do some material engineering research. However, it would be harder to get private science crews into space who can't show short term profits. This would probably require a government for funding.
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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.
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.
Excerpt from RedNova
"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
Odds are the Bigelow space prize will be won well before 2015. That means a private space shuttle will be available for purchase. The best thing nasa can do is focus on scientific missions and provide a market for the contestant in that prize-instead of trying to compete against them.
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?
Did NASA outsource to India?
( there go my karma points )
"We still have the technology to go to the moon, and I would even hazard to guess the technology is there to go to Mars as well, but the money is not there."
I would argue to you that we have no WILL to go back to the Moon...or Mars...or anywhere else that requires putting men any farther than low orbit.
We know that no one else is likely going to another planet soon, so we go "What's the rush? Why spend the money now? It's not like anyone else is going". Doing it for science, and frankly, for history and adventure's sake alone doesn't seem to motivate us.
But let China start a manned Lunar or Martian mission; oh boy, watch how fast we send people back up then.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
I thought this was an odd article, my thinking that an "astronaut" who's never been to space would be an "astronaut wannabe", "astronaut in training" or the more pejorative: "space cadet". According to Websters just being "trained" makes you an astronaut.
" a person who travels beyond the earth's atmosphere; also : a trainee for spaceflight"
Gotta suck when you tell people you're an astronaut and people's first question is "When did you go up?". They probably have the Websters definition loophole printed on the back of their business cards.
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
I bet the makers of Tang, are pissed...
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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.
"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..."
One wrote a book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut".
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.
I heard Burt Rutan built a spaceship capable of outperfoming the shuttle using change stolen from the vending machines at JPL. Oh wait, that's really the truth.
In the last 1960s, Al Bean had been assigned to the Apollo Applications project. He didn't expect to get into space for years, if ever. As it happened, his friend Pete Conrad needed someone to be LMP for Apollo 12, and knew Al was good and was working on long-term stuff that could wait. Al became the LMP for the flight, his first in space, and the 4th man to walk on the moon.
Everyone in the Astronaut training program is looking for their chance to jump the line and get wings, and you never know how might turn out to be the one to flip the critical switch for SCE to AUX and save the mission.
Bean later flew in space again as a Commander on the Apollo Applications mission that became Skylab.
Provided you live in Japan, China, or the EU.
It's only here in the third-world nation of the USA that it's a problem.
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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?