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Crack Found in Shuttle Tank
hpulley writes "The shuttle's new fuel tank, supposedly redesigned to be safer, has a crack in it. Pictures were sent to the manufacturer who decided that it is too small to be worrisome. Hmm, what caused the Columbia disaster, pieces of foam?
Meanwhile, there will be a second shuttle on standby, just in case the first one has problems after being hit by foam, etc. If the first shuttle has a design flaw, what's to say the second one isn't afflicted by the same problem? Won't there be a good chance of them stranding the rescue crew in addition to the original crew? If an aircraft crashes and the redesign to fix it crashes, would you send another of the same type to rescue it? Of course not! The ISS is going to be a smelly, scary place with the regular complement and two shuttle crews onboard and no way home but a Russian Soyuz capsule that isn't slated to launch again until September and has seats for just three..."
Pardon me for being insensitive here, but I always wonder what the problem is with a potentially problematic space shuttle? Is it the cost, bad PR or safety of the crews?
It always puzzles me that a country which recruits hundreds of thousands of soldiers and spends hundreds of billions of dollars to go to wars with guaranteed casualties (and not all die in action) are so timid in losing a relatively small percentage of lives/dollars to go to space.
Everything has a risk, if you send those astronauts to do sky diving (or just drive to the supermarket) often enough, some of them will get killed too.
Why can't we allow those who are more than willing to sacrify their lives to go to space to do just that?
I understand that we have the responsibility to maintain certain level of reliability and to minimize risk, but all the safety concerns are slowing things way down. Other countries are catching up fast, maybe their lives are cheap? Or maybe they knew and anticipated the risk of losing lives to achieve something great?
I guess we can't go to the moon now because of the deadly moon dust, imagine what would have happened if we discovered it before landing on the moon?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
STS was originally conceived in the 60s, implemented in the 70s, and was launched in the 80s. I turned 24 today. The space shuttle first took off when I was six days old.
Sounds like Unix. And we're still using it, too.
If the first shuttle has a design flaw, what's to say the second one isn't afflicted by the same problem? Won't there be a good chance of them stranding the rescue crew in addition to the original crew? If an aircraft crashes and the redesign to fix it crashes, would you send another of the same type to rescue it? Of course not!
Whatever the fuck happened to objective reporting? What is this, Fox News?
I guess because its really expensive to start from scratch? I'm with you though... time for a clean start.
From the summary: Pictures were sent to the manufacturer who decided that it is too small to be worrisome.
I say, tell that to the astronauts who have to sit on top of the goddamn thing.
I bet the people at NASA who are smarter in their sleep than I will ever be could never come up with that.
Hell, I bet this guy knows what the tolerances for the tanks are intricately... way more than the GUYS WHO DESIGNED IT AND MADE IT FLY FOR THE LAST 10 YEARS.
This whole article reminds me of a little dog jumping up and down saying "hey boss, what if, hey boss what if" and you just want to kick it.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
That's actually not true at all. Originally phones were "party lines" where you could pick up your phone and listen to all the phone traffic for the neigborhood. It worked because you mostly didn't have too many people using them at once.
Then they had operators that switched the phone calls for you manually. You picked up the phone and got the operator and asked her to connect you to somewhere else, and she did.
Then there was pulse dialing with those old rotary phones.
Then they added touch-tone.
The phone signals are now often digitized when send over long distances and turned back into analog signals on the other end.
In actual fact, phone technology has been (and is still being) upgraded a LOT.
I agree that the shuttle does need to be replaced but it is not the same shuttle that flew in the early 80s.
No it's not. Those both exploded.
As a matter of fact, they both exploded because something seemingly trivial went wrong, something that nobody in a million years would have thought could endanger the orbiter. Something like a tiny crack in the foam on the external fuel tank. All the processing power in the world won't help one iota if sloppy security procedures and pressure to push the launch through cause yet another seemingly trivial thing to go wrong. I just hope NASA knows what it's doing.
I want the fire back.
Thank you. That is exactly what I thought when I read the stupid wording in the story.
You've got 113 missions. One blew up in flight, one blew up on landing. So 111 successes and 2 failures.
Please won't someone ask the astronauts if they consider those odds a fair risk to take for a flight into space?
Gee, do you think that astronauts might actually be AWARE that you know, blasting into space on a large rocket, might just be dangerous? Do you think they might have figured that little risk into their choice of career?
I really hate people like the submitter who think that they know how to better measure the risk than those actually involved in space operations.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
That attitude is the exact pussified reason we arnt walking around on mars and pickin up space chicks right now.
The greatest accomplishments are made by people who succeed with what they have.
If man could make it to the moon in 1969 useing the processing power of a calculator and we still havent made it to mars yet, then its only because of a shift in attitude.
serenity now!
Because all the programs that were slated to replace the shuttle have been scrapped for various economic and political reasons. We need a vehicle that can take off from an airfield and fly into space without complicated and expensive launch mechanisms to support it for space travel to ever become safer and more commonplace. Look at SpaceShipOne for an excellent start to what NASA SHOULD be concentrating on. Don't blast the thing into orbit on enormous dangerous rockets, fly into the upper atmosphere on wings and then use rockets to boost into space. Unfortunately NASA's single-stage-to-orbit program has long since been axed. It's a pity really.
In neither the Challenger nor Columbia losses was the failure something that was completely unanticipated. Both of the fatal problems had been identified as a specific risk and were being worked on and analyzed when the accidents happened.
Inability to conduct reasonable and overriding safety reviews in NASA's operations was a major and legitimate issue, but your claim goes well beyond what the historical record substantiates.
Sounds like Unix. And we're still using it, too.
That might be the most accurate comparison I've ever read on Slashdot. The thing is, it reads like a troll, but it isn't.
Here are some other thoughts to go with yours:
"Sonds like cars, which still have four wheels and reciprocating engines. And we're still using those too."
"Sounds like the 747, which still has four jet engines. And we're still using that too."
"Sounds like liquor, which still comes in glass bottles. And we're still using that too."
"Sounds like soda, which still comes in cans. And we're still using that too."
You might notice that:
A: All the things we both named have been continuously improved since inception, despite vast advances in the underlying technology.
B: UNIX is the only one unrecognizable in it's current state. (Mac OS X)
C: The Shuttle's concept was not fleshed out properly after it got beyond the design stage. The same is not true of the other designs, which have been forced to compete in competitive markets.
All of my examples (and yours, of UNIX) have done well in the market for over twenty years. The Space Shuttle has not, in my opinion.
I regret that I never got down to Edwards to see the STS land while I lived in California. Odds are it probably won't land there again - unless someone here knows different. The recovery and travel costs are too high for NASA.
Just thought it was worth a comment.
Looking at the design of the shuttle we have three major components. The tank, the SRB's and the orbiter itself. We've had catastrophic failures of the orbiter due to the failures of the SRB's and the tank. Are we biding our time until the orbiter is the primary cause? When are we going to finally get to a simpler design? All the major unmanned missions we launch are upgrading their systems to more robust and newer designs that use simpler configurations (which are usually more reliable). The shuttle has provided a great service, but it's time to leverage it's lessons learned and more forward.
I know it's too late and no one will read this, but...
I would like to point out that the level of engineering involved in the design of the shuttle is in a completely different class than any technology you have in your computer or in your car or that you've likely ever have had physical contact with. Cars and computers advance quickly because they are cheap and if they occasionally don't work no one really cares.
Everyone bringing up the age of the space shuttle sounds like morons. Whatever our next orbiter is going to be, the technology will be outdated. It has to be outdated by the time the thing is ready for flight because it has to be proven. You don't use the latest composite materials or computers in building something of this cost (dollar, life, and national pride) because you don't know how they respond to the excessive accelerations, vibrations, and high energy radiation involved.
This is assuming you're building a real vehicle and not a toy to win a prize. And actually, we probably will not see another feat of engineering like the current orbiter because the government doesn't give money to people who know what they're are doing like they use to and the private sector is too lazy and opportunistic to engineer it right.
"Personally, I'm all for that. Let the private companies make the progressive steps, let NASA become..." let NASA be the FCC of the space 'world', at least here in the usa. just dont give them the outright and overbearingness of he FCC.
Let them be the general populations "seal of approval."
sure they have f00ked up in the past, but you have got to give them SOME credit!
like me having to use BIG M's onscreen keyboard to 'type' this thanks to an unfortunate beer accident...
- You're not paranoid, they really are after you.
The hairline crack is on the side of the tank opposite the shuttle. No one is sending astronauts to their death, this article is looking for a flame war.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
If you had decent reading comprehension, you would have noticed that he didn't say anything derogatory towards "black people" at all. It's more like he called the CIA racist, which the government as a whole most certainly is.
Freaking out when someone mentions anything that could possibly be related to someone whose skin color is dark due to their ancestors living closer to the equator than someone else's ancestors does more to propogate racism, and the idea that there is any real difference between humans of any race other than history, and cultures that were held in certain, static areas of the globs due to lack of instantaneous global communication, and differing natural resources.
Christ.
kaens.blogspot.com
object oriented programing and languages like objective-c are newer concepts
Object orientation did not add any functionality to existing programming, it formalised what had been some existing "best practice" programming styles, and "outlawed" some sloppy programming styles. While clarifying some processes, it also made others more complex. Most competent programmers didn't have too much trouble making the transition.
need a free COBOL editor for Windows?
1. Nasa's rates are too high? The Delta-IV Heavy is one of the cheapest launch systems in the world per kilogram, *despite* the fact that US labor costs are so much higher than Russia's and China's. The shuttle is expensive (although not as expensive as is often portrayed here, and has many capabilities that are widely used - for example, bulk cargo return, which has ferried back spacecraft on about 1 in 3 missions, and was what was keeping the ISS from being loaded up with trash), but the shuttle is hardly the only NASA spacecraft out there.
2. NASA didn't build the spacecraft. *Private* companies like Boeing, Lockheed, Orbital, etc did. In general, they did both the design and construction. Now, if cheaper spacecraft were possible without unreasonable risk, don't you think that these companies, with all of their experience, would just build their own? They've got the budget for it, after all. Some private space launch companies exist, but they mostly use modded versions of Soviet-era rockets, and charge about what the Russians and Chinese charge for space launch; they're not hugely profitable companies.
The only way to seriously get space launch costs down are the "high risk" designs and extensive basic research. Guess who's doing those? That's right: NASA.
By the way, lets just head off an obviously impending argument.
3. The shuttle *HAS* changed since its inception. For example, the bulk alloy of its tanks is now lithium-aluminum; its insulation type has changed; its thermal blankets have changed; its tiles have improved; the SSMEs have gone through a number of refinements; the seals on the O-rings have completely changed (and probably would have changed even without the challenger disaster, as the research was ongoing at the time into the separation problem, which was a well known problem, and not just in shuttle SRBs); etc. But yes, the basic design is old; only the details have changed. There are a number of basic design issues that should be dealt with that we didn't know at the time, and a number of issues that were forced on them due to budget constraints.
What a crazy random happenstance!