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Space Shuttles almost Ready to Re-Launch
stagmeister writes "CNN and Space.com are reporting that the Return to Flight Task Group, the overseeing committee that determines when the Space Shuttles can go back into space, has reported that the only items blocking the Shuttles are issues 'related to tank debris, orbiter hardening and tile repair.' They plan to re-meet in later this month to finalize their decision. However, 'NASA has made clear it intends to resume shuttle flights with the repair capabilities it has in hand without knowing for sure whether they would work in an emergency.' Would you want your children flying a space shuttle that hasn't been properly beta-tested?"
From TFS:
Um....aren't those problems the reason the Shuttles were grounded in the first place???
Also from TFS:
Well...does this 'Return to Flight Task Group' have the authority to ground the flights?
From TFA:
Apparently, they don't.
Remind me exactly why we had a 'Return to Flight Task Group' again...
____
~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Tank debris, orbiter hardening and tile repair have been the "only things" that have stalled a return to flight since the disintegration of Columbia. The Discovery Channel (or The Learning Channel, I can't remember which) spent the entire hour of its program on the return to flight discussing exactly these problems. So what has changed?
NASA needs to recognize that, despite its technical sophistication, the shuttle is too dangerous to operate. It would be better to ship smaller components into space and assemble the equipment in low earth orbit with robots rather than continue to force this orbiter to operate in a manner that risks humans.
The idea that if NASA abandons the shuttle that human spaceflight will stop is crap, despite what the television special claims. I'm sure that the NASA shuttle managers would like everyone to believe this propaganda, but the Europeans, Japanese, Chinese, and others are unlikely to give up on space flight just because NASA dumps the shuttle.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
I certainly wouldn't want my children to do it, as a parent. But I also realize that there are quite literally tons of people who if you presented them with the option of a shuttle flight and told them up front there was a 5% chance they wouldn't be coming back, they'd do it.
Let's face it, if the human race was as careful about other dangerous endeavors as it has been about space flight, we'd still be debating about whether it's a good idea to put those dang horseless carriages on the road, seeing as they don't think for themselves and all..
Won't someone PLEASE think of the childen!
Who did what now?
Did you see Contact? Remember the scene where Jody Foster sees something outside for the first time and they morph the childs face & voice onto her's as she describes what she is seeing?
I'd risk my life to see that, because I know we won't be living on the moon like I thought we would be in the 80s when I was in Jr. High.
As a rock-in-roll Physicist once said, No matter where you go, there you are.
Why exactly isn't Mars that interesting anymore? In the past year, we have discovered that the planet was once covered in liquid water and could have supported life. We have two rovers there now, a few orbiters, and the ESA's Mars Express is about to start their radar mapping of the subsurface to see if there are any large aquifers present. If there is an abundance of water, human exploration and settlement will be that much easier. And as for getting to a planet, we've been going to them for the past thirty years. Cassini is in the Saturn system right now. The only difference between that and sending humans is a larger spacecraft, life support systems, and more fuel.
NASA, by its very essence, isn't able to test things in completely realistic environments. They spend huge amounts of time and energy doing what testing they can, but how in the world (or outside the world) can you test fixing a wing on a space shuttle? There are so many variables that it's insane to attempt
Sure, this makes NASA dangerous, but that's been known for decades. Space travel isn't as easy as driving to the supermarket just yet. Get over it.
Would you want your children flying a space shuttle that hasn't been properly beta-tested?
Screw that. If the chance of coming back alive is at least as good as it was on the 100+ other shuttle launches, I'd give almost anything to go myself. I guess some additional beta-testing might be nice, but how much will it cost?
Hi - this whole safety mania regarding the space shuttle is silly. Yes, it is tragic that two crews have died so far, but lets face it - when traveling in those atmospheric conditions at those speeds and temperature extremes there will always be a risk, even if NASA managers are under pressure to be able to claim it is now entirely safe.
I mean, there are terrible airplane crashes every year, but do we shut down all commercial airflight until we can make it certain that flying has no risk?
On the flip side, we should do more to acknowledge the risks those space shuttle crews take every time they go up for even a "routine" mission.
TWR
It seemed fitting ...
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
Quite Honestly, I would go up in a heart beat. Those shuttles have been tested through and through. Now what is happening is the nit picking over every little detail. I would guess that my 3 year old nissan quest is no where near as safe as that ship is.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Manned missions in space don't make sense from scientific or economic perspectives. For the past two years we've been spending mega bucks on making a lost cause (the space shuttle) safer, but for what? The fact is that metal things are much cheaper (if one blows up, nobody dies). Instead of appealling to peoples hearts and dreams (we went to the moon back in 1969 - when it meant something) we should focus on aquiring knowledge about the cosmos and the like. To do that we don't need people.
"I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed." -- Bruce Lee
The space shuttle program was ruined in its early days by too many government/military/nasa requirements, in short they wanted it to be a "jack of all trades", but because most of the shuttles functionality and specifications are rarely used, it turned out to be "a master of none" because of all the bloat. each flight costs in the order of $500 million rather than initial projections of $10 to $20 million!
;)
The Crew Exploration Vehicle appears to be on the right track, just as the shuttle concept was, lets just hope they dont make the same mistakes again! oh well, if they mess this one up too we can always look forward to the future European EADS Phoenix reusable launch vehicle!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle How a good concept turns into bad reality
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EADS_Phoenix What the shuttle should have been. Leave it up to the Europeans to get it right!
". . .the only items blocking the Shuttles are issues 'related to tank debris, orbiter hardening and tile repair."
Oh, so all that remain are the exact same issues that grounded the program in the first place.
So what have the actually done in the past couple years again?
-> Fritz
Spooooon!!!!!
Oh fuck off. The astronauts know damned well what they are getting into... certainly better than you with your irrelevant software analogy.
It's a blue-ribbon panel harrumphing and nodding as NASA does whatever it wants to. Did you expect something different from our government? I'm just surprised they don't have to consult the Flat Earth Society or put a disclaimer sticker on the Shuttle like:
" This spacecraft was designed using science. Science is an unproven theory, nor is it mentioned in the Bible, so weigh these facts carefully and with skepticism as you decide if you are in with Jesus enough to ride the Shuttle without blowing up. "
Guess what...more people are going to die going to, coming from, and in space...surprise surprise.
I'm sick of this nancy boy, nurse ratchet mentality where there can be no risks in anything and when an accident does happen we have to spread the blame as much as possible. And I'm talking about society in general, not space flight.
"Space Shuttles almost Ready to Re-Launch" Great ... but ... are they ready to land?
2%. And that's darned good for orbital spaceflight.
:)
You're strapping yourself to a gigantic tank of highly combustible fuel in containers made minimally thin (often so weak and with a taper that if you turn them upside down when full, they'd burst), pumped at ridiculous speeds into combustion chambers running hotter than the boiling point of iron, with the entire combustion chamber being gimballed at high speed to keep the craft stable, and hope that the vibration doesn't damage anything important.
In space, you're exposed to extreme temperature variations (and thus thermal expansion/contraction, brittleness, freezing fuel/hydraulic lines, etc), high radiation levels, parts and liquids shifting in zero-G, etc. On reentry, most of that energy that you burned off getting into space must be burned off by your craft, creating temperatures of thousands of degrees that would easily melt most materials, and give even many superalloys the texture of rubber.
Hundreds of thousands to millions of parts, each one with failure potential. Escape velocity requiring enough energy that even the highest ISP exhausts only leave the craft at a fraction of the velocity you need to end up going. A dense lower atmosphere. It's amazing that we can get people off this rock at all, as opposed to simple suborbital hops.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
As to the overall stupidity of that comment, believe it or not, someone has to do the beta testing here. Yeah, it's a tragedy when lives are lost, but that's the nature of the space program: risks have to be taken, because some things just can't be done without real-world testing. Even when the space program is no longer experimental, lives will still be lost, because space, in and of itself, is a high-risk venture.
You know, the stuff that WORKS? The stuff that was pulled out of service for some ridiculous and unproven green PC Bullshirt?
NASA became a worthless joke when they started practicing junk science and let the middle managers rule the roost. Time to shut it down and just fire everyone.
Firstly the reason spaceflight is dangerous is purely because we have no ability to gauge the dangers out there. Space (yes im aware that LEO is quite tame compared to say Lunar apogee during the new moon)is THE most hostile place for a human to go. zero gravity causes phsyiological stresses and potential damages from long term life under microgravity are very unclear despite decades of research. the removal of friction means that high speed debris are ALWAYS a risk, no matter where you are or what orbit, there is very strong chance your rocket will get hit with something, its an absolute certainty. The Shuttle is pounded by micrometeorites and other debri while in orbit. everything from pain flecks from saturn V's to frozen urine from appolo 13, along with the regular space dirt dust and tiny tiny chunks of rock.
I have always been interested in spacefligh and at one point considered Aeronautics to be my eventual feild of work. I do know what im talking about. IANAPRS (i Am not a PROFESSIONAL Rocket Scientist) So i wont claim i know Everything i should or need But im no average bystander with a casual interest in it.
The shuttle is Dying. Clear case point. IT WAS BUILT DEAD. The shuttle was a masterpeice of design and some of the inital work for it was pehonomenal. BUT as all publicly accountable institutions with large goverment funding in any country, they had to deal with political decisions that impacted on the end result of the Space Shuttle.
Personal I want to see the shuttle Fly Purely because its better than the alternative. No i dont mean the russian soyuz modules or even Buran (the soviet space shuttle, which is arguably better given it flew a full orbit test and reentry under auto pilot, Which are by themselves very excelent machines. Abeit more "ruggedized" than the NASA engineers would want. Soyuz is still derived from the Balistic Missile school of rocket science. And there is proof that in fact the Russians are better able to deal with an emergency than the US are presently. A soyuz can be "locked and loaded" ready on the launch pad to take off in 6 hours. This comes from the entire launch fabrication and facilities still being heavily derived from balistic missile technology, which was built to be used quite quickly in the event of a nuclear war.
The american space program tried to leave this behind to "look towards the future" Wernher Von Braun, the German behind the V2 rocket and a significant member of his staff surrendered to the US at the end of WW2 and were essentialy the brains behind the US space program and most of the Balistic missile technology developed leading up to it. He, before even the launch of the saturn V had begun to think about the desin of a "reusable" space vehicle. Taking off like a rocket landing like a plane.
All of this is looking towards the kind of mass market future for spaceflight most here would hope to see someday. But the risks remain great. and currently It appears that the US have taken a step back. Deciding to shift to disposable launches with single use crew modules. While safer due to the elimination of long term mechanical wear and tear it is still going to be throwing precious resources away every time. and adding to the amount of junk in space.
Where it should have gone and NEEDS to go is where some of the prototypes that have come from aerospace research reside and go. There is no reason besides lack of interest stoping us from building a Single Stage to Orbit Space Plane that could take off AND land like a plane at an airport. Dont cite technicalities. Theyre fudged by people that either havent looked at the full picture of available technology, or have a vested interest in not looking at it. Current Aerospace technology if rounded up and applied directly to the problem with the kind of $$$ the us goverment gave back when the Appolo program began or even with the amound of money put into the space shuttles development. Perhaps even with the meager budget given to the creation of the "new" Spacecraft for nasa, th
XML - A clever joke would be here if
Exactly. Imagine all of the amazing discoveries and accomplishments that would never have happened if we insisted on waiting until we could nearly gaurantee that not a single person would be killed or even hurt and that no property would be lost or destroyed or damaged.
Anyway, I'd rather die attempting to explore the universe outside of our little planet than die from cigerettes, cocaine or bigmacs.
"The fact remains that it's a big dead rock. There's a big dead rock a lot closer and we stopped visiting that one because we realized there really wasn't any point in it."
Unlike our moon, the big red dead rock could potentially be a new colony for us. You may not care about that, but I personally enjoy the idea that man kind would no longer risk being completely obliterated by one nuclear war.
"Derp de derp."
Didn't SpaceShipOne re-enter the Earth's Atmosphere using a composite resin body? How was SpaceShipOne able to do this without ceramic tiles? Was it Altitude?
SpaceShip One (orwhatever it was called) was going MUCH slower. It never reached orbital velocity, ~22,500 knots iirc. The heat experienced during reentry is from the atmosphere slowing the craft down. You wouldn't have to shield a craft at all if you were only traveling a few hundred mph. You'd have other problems, of course, but reentry heat wouldn't be one of them.
You've messed up the difference between safety and reliability. The shuttle reliability is 2%- 1 in 50, but the safety is actually only 95.5% (4.5% deathrate) because they put different numbers of astronauts on some of the shuttles (the first launch only had 2 crew for example, and some of the defense-related launches had reduced crew also), but both times they blew up, they had a full crew onboard. If you do the maths, it's about a 4.5% fatality rate.
Shuttle is actually more than twice as dangerous than Soyuz (overall), furthermore Soyuz hasn't had any deaths at all in about 30 years, and none with the current version that seats 3. The reason Soyuz is safer is because they had all the really deadly problems early on when they only risked small crews, whereas the Shuttle is more brittle, and kills at random (hence more likely to kill a large crew).
-WolfWithoutAClause
"Gravity is only a theory, not a fact!"That's unfair. You're must be counting unmanned Soyuz launches toward the total to get the 2% number; the shuttle only does manned work (we launch our unmanned payloads on other craft). All of the unmanned Soyuz failures don't contribute to your count - and there have been a lot on this "less brittle" craft, as you call it (as recently as 2002, where it ended in a firey explosion right after launch). You only mention the manned failures because it makes your side look better; the failures being on unmanned craft, however, was just a coincidence. By the way, that 2002 launch? It killed a soldier on the ground, who undoubtedly wasn't included in your count, in addition to wounding 8 (a mile away from the explosion, at that).
Even if you're counting unmanned launches, though, your numbers still don't make sense. Please elaborate. There have been far more than 4.5 astronauts killed per launch (and what's up with the "%"?), because 2% of shuttle launches have ended in casualties, and each carried 7 astronauts. There have been ~1600 Soyuz launches, but little over a hundred manned launches, of which two involved fatalities, one with one death and one with three deaths. Your numbers, quite simply, make no sense. By the way - if you want to count total casualties of the Soyuz program, you need to add in the 50 technicians killed by an explosion of a Soyuz booster on the pad on March 18th, 1980. It's kind of ironic to think of it, but when you factor in ground crew deaths, even a mostly unmanned (and when manned, minimally manned) rocket like Soyuz could even have a higher death toll than the Shuttle on a per-flight basis, even with 1600 flights (it's hard to say for sure, with Soviet secrecy)
And if you want to talk about Soyuz's abort modes, you better talk about miracles. Remember Soyuz 18a? The crew went through a bloody 21.3g, and stopped just short of falling off a cliff. One person's internal injuries were so bad he never flew again. And even its normal operation can be disastrous - the much maligned "land via wings" approach of the shuttle prevented things happening to it like Soyuz 23, which broke through the surface of a frozen lake and nearly drowned its cosmonauts.
"This wallpaper is killing me. One of us has got to go." -- Oscar Wilde on his deathbed
It's surprising how many people are just appalled by the "loss of life", not to mention money, in the two shuttle disasters.
Let's review:
1. Out of over 107 missions, into a region of existance we know little about, with a machine more complex than most other aircraft, with a crew riding thousands of tons of explosives, we've lost "only" 14 people, in 2 disasters. (That's a less than 2-percent failure ratio.)
2. There have been over 14-thousand fatalities in the airline industry since its start. (Over a thousand deaths in the past 3 years alone.)
3. In comparison to the two known non-US space-flight programs in operation on this planet, the Russian space-flight program with its current Soyuz ship (older than the space shuttle) has been plagued with more problems than death, and the Chinese, although modestly successful, are still back in the days of the Mercury and Gemini missions, flinging people into orbit in capsules with nothing else to do.
4. Despite widespread lack of knowledge on the public's part, the US space program has had wide-spanning benifits to the human race.
5. The number of countries capable of supporting a continual human space-flight program, are few. The number that can do so, and then afford to advance further to make it a process that is safe and as common as airline flights, comes to single digits.
6. The space shuttle remains the only solution available for providing support and maintenance to satellites. It is also the only platform able to move between orbits and locations, and actively interact with other space-based systems.
7. The money spent advancing space technologies, not only benifits us, but goes into our economy.
8. The government spends far more than the entire NASA budget that, without sounding like a hippie, have done little to advance our standing in the world and which have a deadly outcome. If NASA wants to spend millions and billions developing technology that makes our lives better and expands our knowledge, what's the problem? Money burned is bad, but money burned towards a good intention is better than money burned for naught.
9. Do I need to continue?