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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.
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.
Better cramped and (relatively) safe than comfortable and (perhaps) sorry, no matter how remote the chances of a catastrophic event caused by unknown/unmanageable failures, even on orbit.
Finally - jokes aside - wouldn't you think NASA knows at least marginally what it's doing here?
Or maybe they can use...
...the *military shuttle*!! (Hello, WW fans.)
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.
They may hate the shuttle but due to the short sightedness of the last few administrations they have no other viable space lift vehicle available. And they have contractual obligations on the International Space Station. The poor Russians (bankrupt as they are) are pulling more than their share and might get fed up soon if NASA doesnt start pulling its weight. After all the Russian part of the ISS is built independently. They can just close the doors and jettison all the US modules.
Sounds good to me. It ain't like this shit is rocket science
The shuttles are masterpeices of engineering.... circa 1980. Unfortunatly they invested $$$ in a short production run vehicle that seems to still serve the original purpose. If you were to start building one new replacement it would take a long time and cost big bucks.
If they were to start off with a new design they could apply modern techniques/materials to create a lighter, stronger, more reliable system (i.e. a carbon monocot frame, carbon heat shield skin, computers that have more than 640k of ram, etc)
After working out the kinks on paper they could build a few dozen (price per unit should go down with increased volume) and launch more regularly. But then again, I'm just smoking crack here, NASA will never see that kind of budget again. Unless we can convience the public that Bin Laden is camped out in his secret moonbase.
NASA has a good record of recovering after a tragedy.
If you take the Apollo program as an example, the very first Apollo mission was a disaster with three astronauts killed. And yet after that, the Apollo missions were great successes (although Apollo 13 was a close call, of course).
The Hubble Space Telescope was launched with a faulty mirror, but this was fixed and Hubble's become a great success, too.
This program will probably go the same way.
There's an easy solution to the funding problem. It normally would hurt to throw away a $3 billion shuttle, but not if you take the right precautions in advance.
Pass a law giving NASA the sole movie rights to the rescue mission.
That by itself won't even be enough to cover the cost. But wait... there are 293,027,571 Americans according to Google. At $10 a ticket, that pretty much covers it. But how do you get everyone to watch it?
Pass a law that revokes the citizenship of anyone who can't present the ticket stub for the movie on request.
I really need to get into policy work.
How many shuttles can dock with the ISS? If its one , do they draw straws to see who moves Discovery so Atlantis can dock?
The Russians seem to have started building their Kliper lifting body space craft.
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.
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.
If the shuttle's crew compartments are sufficient for long-term habitation, even if it requires borrowing power and such from the ISS, then wouldn't it make sense for the end of life plan be to leave them up there? Sure, they would need extra docking ports for the next generation system, but it might be a good way of providing more habitable space up there.
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."
If I remember correctly, the Buran had the ability to land under remote control. Does the Shuttle have that ability? If the crew must ditch, it'd be neat to try to bring the Shuttle in with no one in it to see if it would make it or not.
Burt Rutan never got his ship into orbit. Not even close.
occultae nullus est respectus musicae - originally a Greek proverb
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.
ISS is capable of receiving routine and emergency visits from automated Soyuz and Progress vehicles. They can stay up there indefinitely, get parts to fix the shuttle, etc. A shuttle can only really "doc" with the Science Lab.
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
Mind you, that last wouldn't be pretty, but this is already an emergency scenario. In such cases, people think way outside the box, equipment gets used for alternate purposes, and plans get modified. Sometimes literally.
Disclaimer: I am not an astronaut, I just work with one.//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
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
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.
FTA: By working around the clock seven days a week, technicians could have Atlantis -- which is scheduled to fly in July -- ready about a month after Discovery's liftoff. In such an emergency, NASA would consider setting aside some of the safety rules instituted after the Columbia accident. A requirement for good lighting conditions during launch, to ensure clear photos of liftoff, could be waived.
So, who would rescue the rescuers if something happens to Atlantis? Endeavour? And after that? I seriously hope it never comes to that, though. The whole world will be watching this, let's hope everything runs smoothly.
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
"wouldn't you think NASA knows at least marginally what it's doing here?"
No, NASA is terrified of losing life.
Along with too many Americans.
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. People are cheap and plentiful, shuttles are not.
And shame on NASA and the bureaucracy for not having the b*lls to find a nice way to say the truth.
So to answer your question, no, I don't think they use their best *scientific* judgement; they're concerned about image.
So, instead of spending the 80s and 90s designing better and more suited craft, they kept up the sham that the shuttle is the best way of getting stuff into space. If someone had had the balls to admit a mistake back then, things could have moved along a lot faster.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
In what way is the Shuttle's track record better than anything humans have ever designed before? Two lethal failures per - oh, let's be generous - thousand uses is *better* than, I dunno, anything up to actual kamikaze missions?
Why shove everyone into the ISS and why only a backuup shuttle for the next two launches? Because there is a life boat, it's docked with the ISS, or at least it will be, hopfully by the time flight three comes around. First it will free fall captules, later to be replaced by sort of a "mini shuttle" if it is ever finished.
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.
itself gets damaged during lift-off? Wouldn't it be safer/cheaper to use the Soyuz docked with the space station and send up a replacement?
Here come da fudge!
Which means that I'm obviously missing something. It probably has to do with the degree of 'wreckedness' of the shuttle.
Seriously though, if there's a good reason to not try to land it, I'm all ears.
-Holmes.
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
Burt Rutan built something that basically amounts to a toy if you compare it to a shuttle (or anything else that can go into orbit). Going up a hundred miles and going into orbit are two fundamentally different tasks. It's sort of like comparing a bicycle to a Ferrari.
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.
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!
Ooh, and there's a ton of history and sci-fi flicks to tell us all the things that could go wrong with this plan, so we can accomodate the most common oversights. I like the way you think, Orbital Penal Colony Alpha Security Guard iamlucky13.
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 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
...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.
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
NASA could out-source its astronauts - maybe to boy bands, telemarketers, lawyers or politicians? give them some training, do just about everything else by remote control, and if something goes wrong there's no need for a rescue mission? just saying, put it there on the table as an option.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
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?
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*
Wrong orbit inclination. The ISS is in a high inclination orbit for servicing from Russia (I can see it rom my house in Virginia when it launches to the ISS if it's at night and clear.)
The Columbia mission was a science mission, in a lower inclination orbit to get more payload into orbit. They didn't have enough delta v to get to the ISS.
Having said that, if the Columbia problem had been propagated throughout NASA, there WOULD have been a rescue mission. And every single astronaut in service would have volunteered to be on it. You can bet serious money on both of those if there happens to be a repeat.