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The Shuttle Mission No One Wants
Fourmica writes "USA Today (by way of TechNewsWorld) has a surprisingly insightful look at the planned 'rescue option' for Discovery's upcoming launch. The plan, which has been mentioned here before, is to have the crew hole up on the ISS until Atlantis can launch to bring them home. My question is, why shove everyone into the ISS? Why not just dock with it, and share the life support supplies between the two systems, instead of cramming everyone into the station?" See this earlier story on the same topic.
The damaged shuttle would have to be jettisoned before a rescue vehicle could arrive, because the station cannot accommodate two shuttles.
Maybe I didn't RTFA properly, but I think it means that the shuttle would stay there and be used until they needed the docking port to rescue the astronauts... it would spend most of the month attached, likely.
rutan hasn't reached orbit he has just barely scraped the edge of space on an up and down
for orbit you need LATERAL velocity as well as vertical velocity (with just vertical you will either escape completely or go up and back down you will not orbit).
There is one simple reason for this decision. There is only one dock for the shuttle on the ISS. Therefore, they must remove the first shuttle before the second shuttle can launch. Until they have confirmation that Discovery is in the ocean, Atlantis will not launch.
The ISS can only dock one shuttle at a time. Discovery would stay there, and be remotely undocked prior to Atlantis getting there.
Seems someone else has thought of this:
"If Discovery were damaged during launch or in orbit, Mission Control would determine whether the shuttle is capable of safely bringing the crew home. If not, the astronauts would be forced to take refuge aboard the space station and wait five weeks for Atlantis and its crew of four to come get them.
The damaged shuttle would have to be jettisoned before a rescue vehicle could arrive, because the station cannot accommodate two shuttles. Mission Control would command Discovery to unlock from the station and fire its steering jets, which would send the vehicle plunging down into the atmosphere. If all went as planned, the remnants would splash into the Pacific Ocean far from any land."
Burt Rutan never got his ship into orbit. Not even close.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
Nevermind, I just found the answer here. It looks like the Shuttle is mostly automated, except for the deployment of the landing gear. I wonder if there is some sort of override so they'd deploy automatically?
Because the shuttle is only a supported flight platform for a very narrow range of parameters on a given mission. Yes, even with all the contingencies. We *know* the ISS is a predictable, stable environment, as opposed to a failed shuttle (whatever the failure is) requiring extended docking with the ISS.
Therefore, living in cramped quarters for a while and losing/abandoning a shuttle is far desirable to potentially losing a shuttle due to yet-unknown circumstances, *and* the ISS, and all of the occupants of both.
Actually, it's probably simpler than that. IIRC, ISS has limited docking facilities, I believe it can only accommodate one shuttle at a time.
In order to accommodate shuttle one, it would need to jettison shuttle one, and make sure it's a safe distance away from ISS.
They're not solar panels, they are radiators. The shuttle must have the cargo doors open while in orbit to radiate the excess heat generated onboard.
Government's idea of a balanced budget: take money from the right pocket to balance...oh who am I kidding?
The shuttle is 1960's and 1970's technology. That's 40 years older than any present day efforts.
And the reason we're still using 1970's technology is that the cost of developing and deploying new technology has always been prohibatively more than the cost of making the 1970's technology continue to work.
It is only now that the cost of keeping the shuttle program going (or, more likely, not being able to keep it going with another loss of a shuttle) is beginning to appear prohibatively expensive in comparison to the cost of developing and deploying a new alternative.
The question is whether we can develop and deploy a new alternative before we're no longer able to maintain the current program.
It's looking pretty bleak.
paintball
First off, the mass is not the critical issue; it's the resistance. In fact, more massive objects tend to decay in orbit slower because cross-sectional area tends to rise O(N^2), while mass tends to rise O(N^3)
At extreme speeds, resistance tends to be proportional to the cross sectional area - it's the main reason that you'll see the fuselage of modern, very fast aircraft/spacecraft often "pinch" near the wings. So if the shuttle is aligned with the orbit of ISS, it won't make too much of difference in terms of resistance. Now, the increased mass will make the ISS's fuel less effective at boosting orbit, but even still, it's not a major issue.
Decay isn't *that* fast or that hard to compensate from. At the very least, the incoming shuttle can provide ample replacement fuel, in addition to boosting the orbit itself. ISS is at a very high orbit, as far as LEO orbits go. It has a long way to go if it is to reenter; I'd imagine that irreversible orbital decay with the shuttle attached would take more than a year, and would probably be closer to a decade.
Margaret Thatcher died the other day. It was a sad day, but I like to think that she's looking up at us right now."
Not so easy. It would require a complete redesign of the entire landing gear system and compartments. The reason why they never designed the LG for remote deployment was in case of a systems failure that would cause the doors to open too early causing loss of the vehicle.
Apollo in its entirety cost 24billion USD in 1960s dollars (this is the first article blurb on google, I'm doing a quick response off the top of my head + google). NASA's budget is about 14 billion 2005 USD. Using an inflation calculator, the approximate value of 24 billion 1965 dollars in 2005 dollars is 142 billion USD. I do not know about the timescales involved in quoted figures, but if we assume it was for the approximately 6 years that apollo was called apollo, then apollo cost 23 billion 2005 USD a year. It should be noted that approximately 1/4 of NASA's budget is used on manned spaceflight - the rest goes to unmmaned spaceflight and aeronautical research.
Assuming all the above is currect, which would be quite a resounding approval for google and "I'm feeling lucky" and quickly throwing together a post before bed using memory, then the Apollo had approximately 5 times the budget that the current manned spaceflight program does... We're not getting to mars for 1/5th the cost of the moon. Hell, we apparently can barely stay in orbit for that!
I'm unaware of the mission that so badly missed Mars (not to say it didn't happen, but it's not ringing any bells). I know there was one where a British contractor expected input in feet and NASA fed it data in meters. I believe that crashed into Mars.
I know that the EU managed to plunge one of their satallites into Mars. Not sure anyone figured that one out (Beagle?)
Everyone knows that's just the Martian missle defense...
Challenger blew up because the people at NASA in charge caved had fairly systemic failures. From what I've read, they literally died because that teacher was on board. They didn't want to miss the launch as it had strong political implications. Google for Richard Feynmann's Appendix on the Challenger Accident. He discusses the wrong headedness of NASA's decision, and that they had a lot of the information to realize it was a problem. His analogy to Russian Roulette is scary, but true.
Here are some decent links:
http://www.westgard.com/guest25.htm
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix. html
Kirby
As part of the CAIB recommendations / requirements, NASA and Lockheed have spent considerable time and money studying foam and ice impacts like they've never been studied before.
With the greatly improved cameras monitering this launch, all anomolous impacts from foam peeling off of the external tank and striking the orbiter will be evaluated by ground teams kept on standby throughout the mission. Using state-of-the art impact analysis codes, a decision will be made on whether the RCC panels and/or ceramic heat shields were hit hard enough to have sustained damage.
And to answer Timothy's question, the shuttle is not a comfortable place to live for more than 20 days. The longest shuttle mission ever was only 17 days. Living in the crew cabin on the shuttle is roughly equivilant to living inside of a chevy suburban with six of your closest friends. The batteries and CO2 scrubbers in shuttle would fail soon after 24 days. In short, the shuttle is a poor substitute for quarters on the ISS.
Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
It is true that the Russians are doing more than their share in terms of getting hardware, supplies, and people into orbit. But remember who's paying for those rockets. As long as they get enough money to cover their costs, the Russians are not going to bail on us. They can't afford to!
"I know there was one where a British contractor expected input in feet and NASA fed it data in meters. I believe that crashed into Mars."
You're thinking of Mars Climate Orbiter, and the British aren't to blame. JPL was expecting the data in Newtons and got it from Lockheed-Martin in pounds. Hilarity ensued.
And Beagle wasn't a satellite, it was a lander. The difference is significant: it was lost *trying* to land (a tricky manuver, really), not because it was so badly steered that it plunged into the planet it was supposed to orbit.
Of course, the worst miss on Mars was the Russion craft that plunged into the Pacific Ocean on launch. At least they know where it is to within, say, 1000 km. Unlike Mars Observer....
No. The mirror grinding was done incorrectly. The gravity effect was taken into consideration.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
Been done - two Chechnyan women who asploded a pair of Russian jets about 6 months ago. They suspect it was C4 in the underwire of the bra. That led to women being told not to have underwire bras at the airport, and several abuses of power during security screenings in which women's breasts were groped by male screeners (or butch female screeners), and some where even strip-searched, including one in a public stairwell.
After more than a hundred complaints on record with the TSA, they changed the rules such that women can only be checked by other women, and screeners must use the backs of their hands when they screen "private areas". This means that, once again, C4-underwires are clear for takeoff.
There are actually 3 Pressurized Mating Adaptors (PMAs) on the ISS but one is the interface between the Unity (Node 1) module and the Russian FGB module. The remaining two can be docked to but if a shuttle is docked to one and a Soyuz is docked to the other (there is generally an "escape" vehicle always attached), then you are probably correct that that one of these vehicles would have to be jetisoned to accomodate the second shuttle.
However, as to the "cramped" ISS versus using the shuttle too, I don't think anybody realizes the size difference. The shuttle has very small crew space. Both the mid-deck and flight-deck are about the size of walk-in closet. The ISS is HUGE in comparison. In the Unity module it's even possible to get to a point in the middle where you can't touch anything even fully outstretched. (For fun astronauts have put someone there to see if they could actually manage to get themselves out -- since they can't push off anything the only way to move is to throw something hard in the opposite direction you want to move. When all you have is your clothes, there's slim pickings -- and yes, it was a woman they did this to.)
A "cramped" ISS would be a lot less cramped than using the shuttle.
One off hand example might be explosive failure of one of the main engines. If it happened late enough in the flight the shuttle might well end up in an eccentric orbit, but with both tile damage and damage to the orbital maneuvering engines. Then it wouldn't be able to climb to ISS or reenter.
The only way a to save the astronauts would be to have a vehicle available that could match the damaged shuttles orbit and either space walk the astronauts across on a tether, or go for a hard docking and move the astronauts through a pressurized passage from the damaged shuttle to the rescue vehicle.
Unfortunately NASA doesn't have such a rescue vehicle.