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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
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.
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
"the shuttle is too dangerous to operate"
Considering that we've only lost about 1 in 50 shuttles, I'd say its an extremely safe machine for what it does. The losses of ships in the early settling of the new world were far greater than 1 in 50. If our ancestors had felt 1 in 50 was too dangerous, the new world would never have been found.
If the shuttle were designed to provide a one way trip to orbit, I'd bet you could find plenty of takers.
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.
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!
Oh fuck off. The astronauts know damned well what they are getting into... certainly better than you with your irrelevant software analogy.
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.
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
The fact that it doesn't require a human passenger makes it inherently safe.
How so? Vehicles that carry humans aboard have to be human rated. Ie they have to be designed with much stricter tolerances, much more paperwork, higher quality, and so on. Not to mention the Russian Kliper is most likely going to be launched on top of a Zenit rocket anyways. The fact that it doesn't require a human passenger just means that no one is going to die unless the rocket explodes on the pad or crashes into someone's house.
You don't like the one I gave you, then tell me why it isn't acceptable (other than the fact that it hasn't flown as long).
I didn't say it wasn't acceptable, but like I did say, the Zenit 3S-L has only flown about 12 times, the Zenit-2 less then two dozens flights where it HAS blown up at least once. Not to mention, the Zenit only carries about 10tons into orbit, while the Space Shuttle Stack carries well over 130tons into orbit!(30 or so tons of payload)
You should also not forget that Columbia didn't blow up during launch, it failed during re-entry. Only Challenger was lost during launch and that could have easily been avioded if they decided to wait until it had gotten warmer(Although they did make the shuttle stack more reliable after that event)
The original comment said that the Shuttle has a very good safety record for what it does. It carries people into orbit. Your Zenit doesn't do that. So your comparison doesn't exactly work.
The Saturn V did well. How many times did it fly? A dozen? Maybe a few more? Fire off a hundred of them, we'll see if the record stays consistent.
It's sort of silly to make comparisons of that sort to the shuttle, because there's not really anything else like it. I think the parent comment's main point was that, while not 100%, the shuttle is pretty damn good in the safety department, and seems to be within the realm of acceptable risk. And if you're not down with acceptable risk, then space flight is not the business for you to be in.
There are plenty of reasons to replace the space shuttle, but safety is not at the top of the list.
One time I threw a brick at a duck.
"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.
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?