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Shuttles Can't Finish Space Station
Doug Dante writes "The shuttle can't make the 28 flights now planned before it retires in 2010, according to Dr. Michael D. Griffin, the new administrator of NASA. It can only do about 15-23, leaving 5-13 planned missions to alternate lift vehicles. NASA is expected to consult space station partners on alternatives once they are approved by the Bush administration.
Should the Space Shuttle be cut loose?"
Why cut it loose, let it complete the missions that it can, then retire it in a timely fashion, just because it can't do all that is necessary isn't a cause dismiss it entirely.
"Plans are for fools! Oglethorpe, the plutonian (Aqua Teen Hunger Force)
'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Slashdot is full of niggers. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that trinity dies ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
Jesus let this $1B a launch albatross sleep in the deepest oceans. We spend more maintaining and compensating for its way overbuilt and ancient design than we do on the missions it's sent on. That and it's starting to get the smell of the old carnival ride "death trap", which no matter how many times you hose out, still smells funny.
Please, let this abomination of attempted Reaganomics and the Cold War die and stop sucking away our already pathetic space budget. The space shuttle has been the biggest obstacle to our conquest of space for the last 25 years, and that's just sad.
p.s. what moron designs the next generation space vehicle that is so advanced it cannot go to the moon or basically do much of anything besides flop around in orbit for a few days? Do we also design submarines that can't go into the ocean?
The first rule of USENET is you do not talk about USENET.
I agree, the Russians have the knowhow on how to construct space stations without the Shuttle - it will be more than likely that the Russians will be the ones to finish the station, even if its a reduced one. Unless of course, the ISS was designed specifically with the Shuttle assembling it in mind, and its impossible to shift that capability to other means - if thats the case, the person who decided that should be shot.
"What we need to do is establish a base on the moon."
Because, as you all know, building an orbital station with the collective strengths of many nations has been a roaring success. Oh wait.
...and kill the shuttle too. Seriously. The international space station is useless pile of orbiting pork. It represents how the US subsidizes industry. No real science gets done up there. The last few years it had only a skeleton crew, barely sufficient for maintenance work.
Kill it. Kill it now. It will free up tens of billions. The shuttle flights alone are $500-800 million a pop. Put the money into real space science and development of cheap launch systems.
Oh wait! Looks like http://www.spacex.com/ is already doing the latter. With private money. Why not go with them? Well, cause that robs the US of an instrument of industrial policy: order way-too-expensive space systems from Boeing and blame the Europeans for subsidizing Airbus.
I trust them to incite fear in the common populace. That's one thing they've got down pat.
Look at the US states were NASA has a large presence. Count the electoral votes they represent. Do you really thing the US Congress or President is going to slash and burn that much federal pork until a substitute is found. What the hell do you thing this new trip to the moon and beyond is about? Washington has no interest in exploration, just protecting their power.
So, we're going to build a base on the moon with non-existent transport, when we can't even finish the ISS with transport we actually have?
The moon base will never happen. The trip to Mars as currently conceived won't ever happen. All we've got now is a faith-based space program to go along with our faith-based anti-missile defense, our faith-based homeland security plan, and our faith-based social security plan. Our national decision makers are completely out of touch with reality.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Should the Space Shuttle be cut loose?"
Perhaps...but there's a better solution: cut the STATION loose.
ISS has been a big hole in the sky into which we pour money that would be better off spent on alternative manned programs and pure science. With two people onboard, essentially zero science is being done up there, or was being done prior to shuttle flight delays.
NASA ought to return to its strengths: scientific exploration and exploratory manned programs (Mars, Moon). Sitting in low Earth orbit, watching seeds sprout in microgravity while being fed by expensive Soyuz and SST flights is simply a waste.
No gods, no demons, and no masters. Secular Humanism!
Oh please.. leave it to the Europeans (with the notable exception of the RUSSIANS) to have never flown a manned space flight on their own. I'll believe the ability of the EU to actually field something like this when I see it.
With the way things are going at the moment there may not be an EU (or at least one that does anything meaningful) in ten years. Witness the current budget battle and the failing of EU referendums.
I wonder why more EU countries didn't hold referendums so that their peoples can vote on the issue? Hmm... maybe because the common man doesn't want it and the elites do. And those silly bastards make fun of the US.
Leave it up to the Europeans to get it right
You yourself said that the shuttle was a reasonable idea when it was early on the drawing board, and it went bad as the project came to fruition...and now you're comparing the ACTUAL American shuttle to a THEORETICAL European shuttle.
The theoretical ANYTHING is always better than the actual ANYTHING.
If the ESA ever gets a shuttle up and running, then we can compare apples to apples.
Until then, your argument holds no water. It's like saying "the party I'm thinking about having is better than that party that you actually had, because your party sounded good, but then when you actually held it, things went wrong".
> The space shuttle program was ruined in its early days by too many government/military/nasa requirements,
But it *had* to do that. The economic case for the shuttle only made sense if you launched it a lot (remember those 50 flights/year projections?), and that required that it serviced as many markets as possible (real and imaginary).
If it had been tailored to a specific purpose, its launch rate would have been far too low to ever recoup its development cost. As it was, this was the case anyway.
The correct decision would have been to do what the Soviets did and continue to incrementally improve expendable launchers.
The Russians can provide cheap flights with proven hardware. Resupply flights with the unmanned Progress ships have been flawless. So have the manned Soyuz crew replacement missions. Congressional politics is the problem.
Especially when we begin to feel the pinch of fossil fuel exhaustion, which in now in the early stages.
There is now more known oil in the world than there has even been before. We are no where near the end of fosil fuel production. The only thing that *might* (and that's a BIG might) be near exhaustion is easy access to high quality (low sulfer) oil supplies. And the primary reason why fuel production from low quality oil is a problem is because we only have a couple of plants that can process it. The reason being? High quality oil has always been easy to reach, abundant, and cheaper to process. In other words, simple ecconomics at work.
The only question is, how much are you willing to pay...right now, there is no end in sight and any one that tells you otherwise is, at best, completely ignorant of the subject.
As the price of oil goes up, more and more fuel options suddenly become econmically feasible. In short, we may change from fossil fuels because of economics and maybe even because of polution, but there is currently zero, not even an inkling of an indication, that we are anywhere near exhaustion of fossil fuels.