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NASA Ponders Postponing Launch until July
BitFluid writes "According to Sun-Sentinel.com, NASA is considering postponing its Return to Flight shuttle launch because of 'ongoing concern about possible ice buildup on a liquid oxygen propellant line.' Apparently, that stuff turns into debris on launch, a risk they need time to investigate. If delayed, the target launch window becomes July 13 through July 31."
Postpone it again? Thats cold man...real cold
Let's stop messing around with this piece of shit and develop something wonderful through international cooperation. Just like in The Contact.
Hmm.. I guess they need my shovell. It take care of my car during winter.
hilarious
Hm. Since NASA is so afraid of ice debris, I guess we won't be landing on any comet that's on a collision course with earth anytime soon.
On the other side, there's enough ice on Mars, carrying the extra weight over there to make some cold Bailey's would just be silly.
Why don't you take the money you're spending on bandwidth and spend it again on charities that help third world countries? The moral position you're arguing in favor of would require it.
Scientific research is a necessity to improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet. Human space flight is an important avenue for scientific research.
By the way, for the record, the 2003 US budget for food aid was $2.5B; for the Shuttle, the budget was $3.1B.
Remember all the ice raining off the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo rockets in the launch movies?
All those guys said was "Let's light this candle"
Spray de-icer on it? Wrap it in an insulator? Blow warm dry air over it? Why can't there be a low tech solution to this?
They could stop the shuttle program and use the money in the few years in between now and when the new man-rated launch-vehicle comes out to seed promising space initiatives by private firms. I'm sure this would more than pay for itself.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
read this as "NASA Ponders Postponing Lunch until July?
Apparenly the delay is due to a sensor failure that occured during tank testing. The delay will assist with getting a few other things sorted too, like cleaning up a hydraulic fluid spill.
NasaSpaceFlight.com has a nice write-up about it.
Here's ANN's coverage of the story.
If you're interested in this and similar sort of news, ANN is a great daily news site you should probably check out.
~Lake
This postponement is so they will have more time to copy the features of Tiger...
Scientific research is a necessity to improve the quality of life for everyone on the planet. Human space flight is an important avenue for scientific research.
By the way, for the record, the 2003 US budget for food aid was $2.5B; for the Shuttle, the budget was $3.1B.
Granted but I still think those $3.1 would have been better spent researching a Shuttle successor rather than keeping those things in operation, they are way past their prime. If the USA can produce an aircraft like the F-22 which (if you believe the Pentagon's hype) has made all the worlds airforces obsolete in a singe sweeping stroke; why on earth is the USA still pissing about with 1970s technology for its space program? You would think the US aviation industry could come up with something better than the Shuttle in a matter of a few years.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
NASA did the job once, but since then they've done nothing but screw shit up.
It's time for Congress to get off their asses and ACT. Jerry Pournelle came up with the idea, which would get us a complete spaceflight system in five years, and only cost 10 Billion Dollars.
How?
Congress must pass TWO lines of legislation.
1) It is in the National Interest of the United States to have a mature spaceflight technology.
2) The Tresurer of The United States is directed to pay, tax free, the sum of TEN BILLION DOLLARS to the first American Company to keep thirty Americans alive and well on the surface of the moon for Three Years and A Day.
That's it folks. If we ain't got it, it's cause BUSH and Co don't want us to have it.
( Not that Klin-ton wanted us to have it, either, though... This idea ain't new. )
All we lack is the will to achieve great things. Killing kids over lies, that we can do. "Supporting Our Troops", check.
Pass TWO LINES of legislation to ensure AMERICANS have a stake in The Future? Nah...
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
"If we die, do not mourn for us. This is a risky business we're in, and we accept those risks. The space program is too valuable to this country to be halted for too long if a disaster should ever happen."
Gus Grissom
I decided to fulfill a lifelong wish and see this launch in person. So I booked my vacation when they announced May 15 was the target date.
Then they bumped it back to May 22 last week, and I had to scramble to rebook everything.
Now they've fucking pushed it back to July. This is the kind of luck I have. If I were to move to Florida, they'd probably cancel the fucking space program and de-orbit the ISS.
Thanks, NASA! I should have known to wait for a few launches to come and go, so you got complacent again and started putting timetables before safety once more.
I'm still taking the trip in May because there's other stuff I want to do/see down there (plus the airlines are downright vicious with the cancellation fees). I'll just fly back down for a day or two when they finally get their shit together.
Well the issue is suddenly that people are concerned about the heat shield failing, yes? On the old rockets that went to the Moon, was it not that the heat shield was hidden almost until re-entry?
It's a design flaw in the Shuttle, essentially. They're making sure that it's less likely happen again, over the course of the Shuttle's remaining years in service. Can you imagine what would happen if the next Shuttle were to suffer the same fate as the last? They're trying to get back to space using the only workable vehicle they have just now, so that the US is back in space, not waiting for a replacement. They might as well try to carry out this risky business in as safe a way as possible, and if that means delaying by another two months, so be it.
Detection.
... I say "medicine is detecting more than in 1965".
... from THIS DECADE!
This is like saying "cancer rates are up compared to 1965"
If you think the early flights were "safer" you're most likely sadly mistaken. They just didn't know about all the problems that could go wrong or had ways of addressing them.
Keep in mind the driving force was to beat the ruskies to the moon. So at all costs.
Though I agree. The shuttles are outdated and there are likely cheaper/safer ways to accomplish the same goal using technology
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
Geez, you gotta feel sorry for these guys. They are proably quintuply(sp?) checking everything! If this one goes boom there will be hell to pay. Poor bastards. I hate management and stupid media. Whats the odds of something going wrong with a flight? pretty high? 5-20%?
And how many accidents have they had in 40 years of space flight? Not many. Come on, they had to have a few bad years.
Best of luck to them! All the best NASA! There area lot of people who love you from the old days. You were and still are the technological pioneers of the world!
Come on, think of the big picture here. I know being simplistic and small-minded is the catch-phrase of our "new generation". But what if they said this 40 years ago? Why even go to space? Look at all of the technologies we have developed whilst trying to get there. We would not be able to live without half of these advances! (Especially the freeze dried food).
More importantly, compare $3.1B against:
(a) amount spent on pizzas in the US
(b) amount spent on election campaigns
(c) amount paid to actors for acting?
If you are going to be fair, then be fair. Talk about it being a capitalist world, and that we only give money for food at all because we are:
(a) making ourselves look better on the world stage
(b) appeasing that guilty little bit of ourselves
Good luck NASA! You guys will be the ones that get us off the planet one day.
FloridaToday.com has an article this morning indicating that they *have* postponed the launch.
? AID=/20050429/NEWS02/504290343/1007
http://www.floridatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article
One thing I quickly learned after moving down here to the "Space Coast" area, is that Florida Today usually knows before anyone else does!
The simple truth is the average American just doesn't care anymore. Congress is only concerned when NASA funding will bring pork and jobs to their districts. There's no long term commitment, funding, motivation, or fascinating technology there. The average Joe would rather watch SciFi, it's cheaper, less dangerous and fits his 60 to 90 minute attention span. Maybe it is time to scrap manned exploration for now and de-orbit that international boondoggle.
Not to mention, NASA would then have two big events competing for air time, the shuttle and the comet-impacting probe that is set to collide on 7/4/05
Moot point, since the launch window for the shuttle starts on the 13th.
While your argument sounds good, you're using Straw Man numbers. The government is only one small piece of the pie.
The amount of aid given by private charities is many times more than what the governemnt gives. Consider how much is anually given by: United Way, Red Cross, the Catholic Church, 1000's of other Christian churches, etc.
Oh how I tire of liberals with government tunnel-vision. The private sector has always (and always will) do more food aide, and do it more effeciently.
-MrLogic
NASA is not going to launch another shuttle. They're just going to play the "One more thing" game 'till everyone gets bored with it and gives up. Even when the shuttles were working it was nearly impossible to plan a vacation around it: you'd wait on the intercoastal for 5 hours with your scanner listenening to rebroadcast NASA transmission only to have the launch scrubbed when the 2-minute hold goes into the launch window.
The moral is: never plan your trip around a shuttle launch. An atlas or titan launch, that's another story - you can get a bit closer since they're launched from canaveral rather than kennedy - though they delay those as well.
Florida Today has good coverage of spacey things. Scan the pages for upcoming launches. It's too bad you won't be in town on May 11. There's a delta 2 launch.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Am I the only one who initially read this as 'NASA Ponders Postponing Lunch until July'?
It may be a case of 20-20 hindsight, but trying to keep giant tanks of cryogenic gases cool and ice free in Florida seems a mistake. Granted, there are huge advantages to being located towards the south, so heat is a given, but the whole icing problem would have been reduced by launching from Edwards, Yuma, or White Sands.
I wonder if anyone has considered wrapping the tanks loosly in mylar and blowing dry air in to create a bubble. You'd get some thermal barrier effect and avoid ice. The trick would be to rip the mylar off in the seconds before launch, but some Vegas magicians could teach NASA how to do that.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Read the article. There is a plan to use infrared from sources 500 feet (meters? I forget the units) away. However engineers are not confident that it will work. Blowers might work, except that you either need them on the tank (more weight to lift, and not areadynamic), or you put them on the platform and hope they never fail to retract after the main engines are lit.