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NASA Postpones Shuttle Launch
Mictian writes "NASA has decided to postpone Discovery's upcoming Return to Flight (STS-114) by a week to May 22. This is done in order to give the agency more time to finish paperwork, analyses and reviews of safety changes made. The delay came as no surprise, since the original May 15 date was always considered preliminary. The current launch window extends from May 15 to June 3."
Concerns about shuttle safety have been largely responsible for 22 major changes in the orbiter's design and as many as 40 more minor changes. "All of the redesign is complete," with a few exceptions, said Wayne Hale, deputy manager of the space shuttle program.
Last minute code release! Always a smart move....
The Custom Mary
I mean, true, we really do need to get back to our normal routines of spaceflight, but we also need to make sure it's safe and that we're not going to lose any more shuttles due to microfractures or falling ice or whatnot.
Of course, this is also why I think that more effort needs to be put into commercial space vehicles, so as to make spaceflight more commonplace.
They have to wait because the Google website logo with the little space shuttle in it wasnt ready yet.
Turk: Let's play Steak. J.D.: What? Turk: Steak. The 1st person to finish their steak is the winner of Steak. -Scrubs
Always delays... what are Nasa doing? I mean come on, it's not rocket science...
Would you rather someone be accountable for an accident or people to just go around and say "uhhh I don't know whose fault it was or what caused the problem because we didn't do any paperwork on it"
As annoying as it is, that paperwork is important. We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost. Of course if you wanted to create a new Saturn V you would start from scratch because you want modern technology, but still it would be helpful to know how any why the Saturn V was done the way it was, and what problems they had to work around.
Even when the paperwork is obsolete it is useful to get a picture of where you were.
Paperwork is your checklist. Many times in my life I thought everything was done until I went through the checklist. If you don't do the paperwork you don't know if you checked everything. It would be really a bummer to find that the main fuel tank was never filled, only "topped off" to replace evaporation/leakage while waiting on the pad. (that is just enough fuel to get off the pad, but not enough to get into space) Only by running through a checklist can you be sure that step was done.
Remember the saturn Moon probe of a few months back where they forgot to put turn the radio on in the checklist? The radio wasn't turned on. There are plenty of major mistakes that only doing the paperwork (annoying as it is) can prevent. Of course doing the paperwork won't find problems that aren't in the checklists. The sheare volume of things that need to be done mean that for minor things you sometimes hope someone did it, but live with it when someone forgets.
I suppose it's a matter of perspective. If I'm strapped to the top of a rocket, I want to be sure that every seemingly trivial detail has been documented and double-checked.
By the way, one of the reasons that NASA was able to return to flight so quickly after the Apollo 13 incident was that they were able to go back and determine exactly what had caused the oxygen tank in the SM to explode. In looking back through the "paperwork", they were able to determine that there were two separate events (tank dropped two inches, and relays not updated to new pad voltage reqirements) that contributed to the explosion. By the way, the tank dropping incident happened two years before the crew was named!
In the Apollo days, they used to joke that they weren't ready to launch until the pile of paperwork matched the height of the rocket. (363 feet)
As far as I'm concerned, nasa does not really have a good track record for safety, despite all their efforts.
Before challenger blew up, the engineers tried to scrub the launch citing a possibility of the o-rings leaking. Pressure at the highest levels made sure it went as scheduled because before then, they had a flawless record and it was just a possibility and they had their image to maintain.
Of course, there was the investigation and they ultimately had to go lick their wounds. Years later and especially 9/11 later with budget cuts and the space program being scoffed at due to being essentially a money pit when it could be 'better spent', it's not surprising that a few years ago columbia vaporized on re-entry.
It may very well be damaged heat tiles by sheets of ice falling off the main fuel tank during launch which is the official story, but (...dons tin foil hat...) what might not be official is that due to such cuts and possibly a bit of politicking, pressure was put on all sectors of the space program including the 'garage' that inspects and repairs the heat tiles. If it's possible that the garage was under enormous pressure to get the aging columbia ready on time, they might have let a few suspect tiles go which they might not normally have let got and had they been replaced properly, they might have withstood the impact of the ice falling.
The russian space program seems to take the licking, learn from it and move on. Nasa to me seems to shuffle their feet for a while saying to themselves, 'how can we stop *THIS* from happening again?', but should instead ask the question, 'How can we stop accidents from happening again?'.
next billion?
2 questions: why does mankind have to surive the next billion years, or rather, why is it the job of an agency of the US governement to assure such a thing?
2) since multi-cellular organisms didn't really take off until almost half that amount of time ago (600million years ago), primates didn't walk on 2 feet until 4 million years ago (1/250th of that billion years), what in the world^H^H^H^H^H universe makes you think humankind will be around a billion years from now? Whatever is around then will be well beyond our capability to understand or predict. I mean, our species is only 50k years old (1/20,000th of that billion) and already in that span of time has evolved *considerably*. We don't even look like we did 200 years ago, much less 2,000. Do you really think we'll be anything like this 50,000 years from now, and that we'll be even remotely the same *species* as this a million years from now (1/1000th of that billion years). If not, who are you to dictate what their survival will require? Maybe within the next few thousand years we'll finally start doing population control, for instance. There's an idea. All other species seem to do just fine...we should be able to figure it out too, being "smarter" than them.
I don't know about that. The Shuttle can circle the earth a couple times on a single tank.
this is the most important sig ever! In your face 446154!
The shuttle Commander is a babe, too.
It's not a lie. It's the truth with lossy compression.