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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.
Easy, it's the lack of Fuel.
The combined mass will use more fuel to maintain orbit.
I thought they were retiring the shuttle program? Personally I am to the point where these shuttle flights are a big waste of money "if" they are not doing anything innovative to help the next breed of space capable crafts.
"We *know* the ISS is a predictable, stable environment, as opposed to a failed shuttle."
Yes. Rock solid and *very* predictable and stable, indeed.
sig not found
Still more predictable and stable than having a shuttle with a catastrophic enough failure to require crew rescue attached to it.
My guess on the docking question would be that the Shuttle has a relatively short period where it's life support is designed to operate. While the shuttle is operating sufficently, that's fine, but once it's systems start failing (like, running short on power, oxygen, etc), then it's an additional load on the ISS.
Also, this sounds like a last resort choice, so they'd only be docking up once they're relatively close to running out of supplies.
Also, if I remember correctly, the shuttle's solar panels are deployed from the cargo bay, which would be impossible to deploy while docked with the ISS. At very least, it would make it impractical to move the shuttle into a more favorable attitude for good exposure to the sun.
Myself, if I knew I was floating around in a big tube in space, which was the only thing keeping me alive, leaving a big crippled airplane tied to the site through a narrow tube, I'd rather not keep the door open very long. If something happened, I'd rather it peacefully float away, rather than risking that narrow tube become a relatively big hole in the side of my big tube I called home.
When floating inside a helium balloon, avoid pins.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Also remember that Burt Rutan (a personal hero of mine) is able to do this BECAUSE of the shuttle and other accomplishments of NASA. As he himself has pointed out. All the variables have been found out. You can't make cheap things without somebody making an expensive version of them first. Do you think Ford would have been able to make cheap cars without other people having made cars before him.
Also remember that the Burt Rutan space ship is a LOT more dangerous than the Shuttle. The Shuttle's track record is better than anything humans have ever designed before. And that is one of the reasons why it is expensive. In government spending a fatality is unacceptable. In private industry well... Shit happens.
The shuttle will only be abandoned if there is damage. What if that damage causes the shuttle to blow up and a large chunk lands on a building, or several, in Texas? It would be neat to see a damaged unmanned shuttle safely land, but the risk of killing a lot civilians is most likely to great.
Now, here's an interesting question: If the failure is really that serious and catastrophic, how do they intend to get the shuttle to the station - or vice versa?
Well, this presumes that the shuttle is still functional enough to get to the ISS.
This is just a typical reactive strategy, e.g., the last shuttle completed its entire mission, but just *couldn't land* because of the foam anomaly. So now they'll look for this one-in-a-who-knows-how-many occurrence, and have a "rescue plan", as all the people who don't realize how complex this is asked about last time. It's just a contingency plan, because is something even remotely similar ever happened again and they didn't plan for it, NASA would be raked over the coals and heads would roll.
So, yeah, if something really bad happened, there's no guarantees the shuttle could get to the ISS at all. They just have to plan for the eventuality that it can.
The only sort of failure that would have them going to the ISS is something that would make impossible to land, such as damaged tiles. Any sort of life support system failure, they can still probably land the thing faster than they can dock to the station.
So now they'll look for this one-in-a-who-knows-how-many occurrence
Kind of like how in the states they make you take off you shoes during an airport security check.
Everyone likes to point out that a first gen Palm Pilot is more powerful than the systems on the space shuttle. However, keep in mind that these machines are highly specialized, unlike a general computing platform. While a Swiss Army knife might be more "advanced" than a hunting knife, which would you rather have when the only thing you need a blade for is field dressing a whitetail deer? Furthermore, more often than not, a system's reliability is inversely proportional to it's complexity.
You make a valid point that the shuttle program (or it's successor) could hugely benefit from new tech. However, to imply that it's on it's way to being a usless antique is a mischaracterization.
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This is /., so a sports analogy is probably wasted here, but it is a bit like the aging football player taking shots and hobbling through a season to prove he's not dead yet.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Granted, the Shuttles goes into a much higher orbit,
If by that you mean AN orbit. Spaceship one is a dinky little 3 man craft that didn't achieve orbit in the slightest. The space shuttle on the other hand is a giant bus that can haul tons of payload into orbit. It's like the difference between a bicycle and a Mack Truck.
it, like every bureaucracy, has become an entrenched special interest, more concerned with preserving its budget than in actually moving the cause of space flight forward.
Nasa has quite a small budget, and more than just a mission of space flight. The main mission Nasa is pursuing is one of science. The secondary (and FAR more costly one) is manned flight. Nasa simply doesn't have the budget to develop next-gen spaceflight (Rutan is pursuing yesterdays spaceflight at cheap prices, a VERY different goal). No politician in there right mind wants to give Nasa the huge amounts of money it'd take to develop these new technologies.
The shuttle monopoly has strangled the development of alternative launch vehicles,
The shuttle has done about nothing either way to the development of alternative launch vehicles. Satelite launch technology has been steadily developed. If you're talking about manned missions, lack of public interest in the whole endeavor is what killed that. Public interest == money. No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
A lot of people had predicted we'd not only have launched a manned mission to Mars by now, but set up a colony.
A lot of people are idiots and don't realize how much more difficult Mars is compared to the moon.
Until there's a serious shakeup among the upper echelons of NASA bureaucrats, expect for the U.S. manned space program to creep along rather than soaring.
No, until the majority of the public gets motivated to dedicate massive funding to Nasa the manned US space program will creep along. During the 50s and 60s the US was motivated by the Cold War. We reached the moon, and defeated the "bad guys". After that everything was just anti-climactic. Now that we've been to the moon and the Cold War is over, what's motivating the public?
AccountKiller
If not, it damned well should.
:)
The Buran is essentially an aerodynamic copy of the shuttle and was test launched, orbited, and landed by either remote control or automation, I forget which.
Soviets figured the thing was worthless so they stuck with Soyuz.
Took us, what, ~110 launches to start to figure that out?
Bankrupt Russians, no shit... Wealthy Americans, in national debt up to their noses, thanks, Mr. Bush...
He also hasn't lost lives, that I know of.
He hasn't lost lives, he's only temporarily misplaced them. But it's okay, they'll be in the last place he looks.
I thought this was supposed to replace the Shuttle.
No problems, only solutions
The original shuttle specs had a two week turnaround, with a launch every week or so. (Modulo my faulty memory since I remember looking at the specs before the first flight.)
It was also scheduled to be retired years ago. Heck, probably a decade ago by now.
Those original specs were never realistic, but a lot of the difficulties are because of the compromises required to serve many masters. E.g., the size of the cargo bay was mandated by the military (to hold their satellites), as was a large "cross-range" langing zone. The original design had a smaller cargo bay and much narrower wings.
As for bureaucratic side of your argument, check out the competition a few years ago. Several companies, including a guerilla team at McDonald Douglas (iirc), were invited to develop prototypes of the next generation shuttle. A lot of people were very enthusiastic about the guerilla effort - it was a basic system built atop proven technology, and it had already had several successful flights with fast turnaround.
NASA went with the sexiest, most unproven design that would require breakthroughs in something like three different technologies. I haven't heard anything about it since the competition.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
that NASA is all pent up about sending the shuttle back into space with a feable backup plan when they sent a total of 33 men on 11 do-or-die Apollo missions. There was no recovery for a failed Apollo mission, it was fly or die. Funny how the Cold War seemed to convince many to accept much slimmer margins of error then are currently accepted.
Maybe the cold war was the best thing that ever happened to the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.
Whatever. Flying on a space shuttle is considerably less riskier than many jobs out there (police officers, construction workers, etc.). I don't even know why such a huge deal is made of shuttle accidents. There has been what, 15 dead astronauts in the last 40 years? Compared to thousands of traffic fatalities a year? Thousands of dead and injured soldiers in Iraq? Sure, flying on a space shuttle is not the safest job in the world, but it's not unacceptably risky.
Failing to keep track of food stocks is a bureaucratic problem, not a technical one.
It tells me that you don't know an apple from an orange.
The most directly comparable government project to the SpaceShip One was the X-15. It flew just as high as SS1 (and it could fly ~4X faster to boot). The only thing SS1 has over the X-15 is two extra passenger seats. In both cases the vehicles only achieve 3% of the kinetic+potential energy required to get "into orbit".
A quick review of the mission history shows that they did a 1-day turnaround for two launches in December, 1964. One could also ask why it took 40 years before Rutan achieved a similar feat.
Whether Congress will provide funding based on the obvious is another matter entirely.
paintball
Re landing gear: I heard it while in classes for Aerospace engineering, and I have repeated it as well; however, after looking around for links earlier I am wondering if is true. I'll ask my NASA friends and see what comes of it. After looking around it looks like the MC takes over just before or after crossing below mach.
The GP is just full of crap and should be marked '-5 Trying to be impressive' or something.:
Because landing the shuttle is hard.
We can't even reliably auto-land
a passenger plane, and they're incredibly forgiving airframces.
Err, yes we can. When we implemented autopilot landings the system was so precise that the engineers had to go back and randomize the landing area; every single landing was basically right on top of the last, pulverizing that area of the runway. Not saying that we use these on commercial flights yet, but the technology is out there.
The shuttle is an incredibly unforgiving airframe -- it comes in along a 1:1 glide path. Unpowered. At about twice the speed of sound.
The System *IS* fully automated, that I know for sure. When humans take over the argument is that there is no redundancy in the onboard comp.
The Space shuttle L/D (lift to drag, which equals glide ratio) is about 4 for most of the flight.
Landing speed is a little over 200 nmph.
Did I mention that the shuttle has no maneuverability beyond that provided by its control surfaces? Once committed, it's going to land; there's no second chance.
Well, ok. That is certainly true.
If we tried to bring it down on autopilot, it would only make a really big crater.
Beh. Even assuming that we don't use autopilot because it isn't capable, which isn't the case, the human pilot is only in control for about 4 minutes, and only when the shuttle has dropped below about 600nmph.
Let's say there is a problem with the space shuttle. NASA sends the shuttle to the ISS and starts planning the rescue mission. Directly after the astronauts arrive at the ISS they ditch the old, probably damaged shuttle. Now a month passes food, water and air run out. And all of a sudden NASA finds a problem with the rescue-shuttle, or some other circumstance (bad weather, hurricane that damages launch-facilities). And let's say that this situation is so severe that it is 100% sure that the shuttle is not going to be able to rescue the trapped astronauts (the rescue-shuttle exploding while taking off is of course also one of the possible scenario's, but not relevant to this idea). What are you going to do now? Draw straws deciding who is allowed to use the soyus rescue-ship and let the others (probably 6) starve to death?
Now if you delay dumping the original shuttle until the very last moment, just a few days before the rescue-shuttle arrives you give them a last resort. Yes, you are probably going to have to dump the shuttle before the rescue-shuttle arrives so it won't work as a backup in case the rescue-shuttle's launch fails, but in a lot of the other scenario's taking your chances in the damaged shuttle *is* going to be a viable backup-plan for the backup-plan. After all, taking your chances in a shuttle that might not make it, is better than staying up at the ISS where you know you're going to run out of oxygen or food.
The NASA people in the article claim that they feel good about at least having an option. "Any option is better than nothing". I don't agree. This rescue-mission is an option that should probably never be used:
With a rescue mission on hands NASA are probably off worse because they can now be coerced (by themselves or by others) to perform a rescue in situations that are relatively low-probability
A rescue-mission would probably be usefull once in the 100 mission failures. 50% Of all failures (while going up) is non-rescueable anyway: their only option is to abort. You do the math, this is not worth it. There are probably a hundred other safety-improvements that would increase their chances of survival more.A cristal-clear-scenario might be when one of the wings of the orbiter was clearly damaged beond repair. Now you know that this thing is not coming back in one piece. NASA-people want a way out. I say: go to a hospital and study dokters: they tell people that their lives have run out every day. It sometimes happens. If you can't deal with that (or even the posibility of that happening) you are not fit for managing a spacefaring organisation.
Now everytime a fly is squatted on the "windshield" some NASA-program manager is going to have to decide wether or not to start the rescue-sequence. And the decision-process in NASA is difficult and prone to error.
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Wow, you wouldn't risk your insured little house to help your nation save a $3 billion shuttle. Nice patriotic spirit!
...but why, oh why, an old, simple combination of Salyut/Mir and Soyuz/Progress ships constantly visiting it, was a much more reliable, convenient, useful and cheaper than all this pretending-to-do-2001-the-space-odyssey-remake stuff?
No one to rescue -- Soyuz docks with Salyut/Mir, all work is done in a relatively large station + modules, and if anything wrong happens, there is another Soyuz attached.
No giant airplane-thing to land -- a small landing capsule is the last thing you would expect to fail (not that there weren't early failures, but that was long ago).
Soyuz can sit attached to the station being actually useful, with its living space, fuel and engines, as opposed to the shuttle that mostly produces corrosive gas and stress on the flimsy station.
If anything is REALLY wrong, another Soyuz can be launched in a reasonable time, and without some insane risk, as long as the Khrunichev factory will continue making what by then can be considered mass-produced parts, as opposed to unique shuttles.
That was the state of the art two decades ago. Six Salyuts plus Mir operated like this. And there was more scientific work done than bickering and genitalia-waving between participants in those projects (bickering and waving between the countries was another story though). Can we now make something that isn't significantly worse than things that flied 20 years ago?
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
Suppose the shuttle turns out to be in worse shape than it was suspected? After it's in the atmosphere, right on track for a "safe" area in the desert, suppose something goes wrong. And then the shuttle comes down in the middle of LA....
Ditching it in the middle of the ocean is much safer than any option that brings it in over land. That's why Mir was dumped in the ocean as well.
It might be safe to bring a damaged shuttle in over land, but nobody will want to take a chance on it going bad.
Why would the damaged shuttle need to be
dumped? It may well be that the damage
is regarded as risky for human use, but not
fatal (such as happened last time). What stops
the shuttle autolanding empty? As far as I know,
the only manual part of landing is putting the
wheels down, and there's a ground override for
that anyway. The myth of NASA folk as uber-pilots
has to be maintained, of course, but the shuttle
lands totally automatically once the deorbit
burn has completed.
ian
Here's the thing...when the 6 astonauts died in the last shuttle accident it was too bad. Terrible.
But...it was no more terrible than 6 anonymous people dieing in an accident on the interstate. Its the same thing morally.
In people's minds though, its worse...and it is, but mainly because of the loss of equipment.
No. It's because those astronauts were "important", they were celebrities, media heroes. At least during a mission. People feel that they "know" someone they repeatedly see on TV, even if it's one-sided, and thus they care more about Jennifer Lopez having a cold than someone they don't know dying of cancer.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I'm wondering why the preferred rescue scenario is to send up another shuttle? I thought that the station kept a Soyuz module connected at all times as an emergency escape vehicle. So there's three folks who can return. Send up another one shortly thereafter, and there's another three folks. Then you are back to the ISS normal compliment.
Right?
Bravo!
I wonder how hurricane season will factor into NASA's mission planning (or if it will at all). Imagine if Discovery flew on Sept 1, suffered some sort of failure, which activated the rescue contingency. If all went according to plan they'd fly the rescue mission no sooner than 33 days after Sept 1.
Imagine if during the month of September the eastern side of Florida is on the ass end of an ass-whipping from a hurricane (or multiple hurricanes as was the case last year). Can engineers safely make the long drive out to the cape to work in the vehicle assembly building?
How would the high wind and rain effect the crawler that moves the shuttle from the vehicle assembly building to pad 39?
Before Columbia NASA would've hunkered down and given folks a few days off a storm blew through. But with possibly 7 crewmen stranded in space NASA no longer has that flexibility.
The bottom line is that violent weather is a very real problem in Florida from late August to early November. I'm sure the mission planners are brighter than this SlashDot poster, but I hope that they've factored in meteorological effects into their rescue contingency.
-c
Do it for da shorties
http://www.penmachine.com/2003/02/is-being-astrona ut-most-dangerous-job.html
...with 34 deaths out of 450 spacefarers, we have a 7.5% death rate. In terms of the "dangerous jobs" statistics above, that's more than 7,500 deaths per 100,000. So being an astronaut or cosmonaut is well over 60 times as dangerous as logging, and has nearly twice the fatality rate as climbing the world's highest mountains.
Sounds pretty dangerous to me.
If an emergency shuttle trip was delayed, couldn't the crew of the failed shuttle use that? Then the ISS crew would be SOL if something happened until another module was docked, but I'm saying there are some options here, that Real Engineers (like Real Programmers) -- and there still are some at NASA -- would find and be able to choose from.
Actually, the escape module may not be designed to accomodate a re-entry with 7 people. The potential crew of the ISS was supposed to be on the order of 7 or even more (back when we were going to actually do enough science on it to get some sort of return-on-investment from it!) Maybe we should get cracking on getting a real escape module on the ISS that could accomodate the specced crew of the ISS! That would solve 2 problems at once.
KLAATU, BORADA, NIh*ahem*
Yes, it most certainly is. And in the case of minor damage, they'd likely just have the crew come back on the damaged shuttle rather than any of the more drastic contingencies. (Landing with a few missing tiles has become rather commonplace.) The difficulty comes in the definition of "minor damage."
Take the hypothetical case where another foam hit punches a hole in the leading edge. At that point, it's already been demonstrated that the craft's behavior is no longer predictable. The grandparent post was suggesting, "Why not try landing it anyhow?" My response was that you don't want to risk bringing a severely damaged spacecraft down in an uncontrolled manner over a populated area.
The Mir example I tossed out was just another example of a spacecraft being disposed of in a manner where even the worst case still didn't risk breaking up over a population center. They could have brought it in over land, "because maybe we'll learn something useful" but nobody wanted to risk the having a large piece of spacecraft land on a school.
But...it was no more terrible than 6 anonymous people dieing in an accident on the interstate. Its the same thing morally.
Actually, that's not true. I would say some poor schmoe dying on the interstate is MORE tragic than astronauts dying in space. The guy on the highway is probably just going from his crappy job to his tiny house with his bitchy wife (or her abusive husband - let's not be sexist) and bratty kids. The astronauts that die in space are actually doing something they probably have dreamed of doing since they were children. They all know the potential risks and signed on anyway.
Unfortunately, while we value human life, the reality of the situation is that everyone dies and any type of exploration is dangerous. Where would we be if every exploration expedition in the world was scrapped because of a loss of life. I think we should take every reasonable precaution, but scrapping a space program because a few astronauts lost their lives is just dumb.
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I'll only comment on a small part of your post...
They wouldn't allow them to starve on the ISS. The Russians would resupply the ISS and thus the astronauts could survive until the third shuttle can be launched. Or if that doesn't work out, they could always remotely dock unmanned Soyuz craft and farry the astronauts off three at a time until all residents of the station could be returned to Earth.
So as long as they can get to the station, they're safe.
You're correct that the computer code to do an automated landing is in the software loads. However, if I recall correctly, there has never been a test of the automated landing system. Thats a hell of a risk with a multi-billion dollar spacecraft. If you're planning on ditching the shuttle anyway where's the risk?
Sean.OutaHere()