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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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
"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.
Hey that's not fair. In this case it's the PEOPLE on the space station who were unpredictable. After all they ate the extra food, not the space station.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
Scene: Really important looking high tech meeting room, deep in the bowels of JSC. The acting administrator Frederick D. Gregory, chief scientian Dr. James B. Garvin, chief of staff John D. Schumacher, chief safety and mission assurance office Bryan D. O'Connor, and the head of the shuttle program William Parsons, as well as several less important figures are huddled around a single computer. Suddenly, Gregory gasps.
"My God!", he exclaims.
The others all crowd even closer together to try to get a look, which would have been difficult even without the mass of people due to the thick smoke that had gathered over the course of this marathon meeting.
Gregory regains his composure, and trying to keep as dignified as possible stammers out, "lostwanderer147 doesn't think we know what we're doing."
A hush falls over the assembled chiefs of NASA.
He contines. "He says we're in a death spiral, and unless something big happens soon, the US space program will be history."
There's a low murmer as they discuss what must be done, but almost immediately Schumacher has a solution.
"We've got to contact this lostwanderer147, and give him full control of NASA, as he alone is our hope for a future."
Everyone agrees, and they set about trying to find him.
Tragically, his email address is not displayed with his postings or profile, and NASA is no more.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.