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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!!
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.
It's our money they spend, and it's not meant for their personal pleasure.
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.
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
Why not? Current commies (China) make almost all our clothes, our toys, our machines....
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"
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.
A lot of people don't seem to realize that NASA is a research organization, not a space cargo organization. Most of their budget generally goes to new research. Even a sizable chunk of the shuttle's budget (from which that 13k$-15k$ per kilogram number comes from, compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5 and 7k$ for Proton and Long March (although they get the benefit of cheap labor)) goes to research on how to lower maintenance costs and improve performance of reusable craft. The shuttle itself was really a research craft; you might have noticed that most of NASA's manned space program craft have been designed to try and push the envelope. If you want a cargo workhorse, use a Delta or Atlas, or go overseas.
As an example of how much research NASA does, just take a look at how many papers there are on NASA's site that just contain the word "novel".
Rutan doesn't do research. He doesn't have the budget for it. His budget was about right for what he did: a completely unscalable joyride craft.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?
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
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.