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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.
"We *know* the ISS is a predictable, stable environment, as opposed to a failed shuttle."
Yes. Rock solid and *very* predictable and stable, indeed.
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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.
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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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?
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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.
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.
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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