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107 Cameras to Scan Discovery for Damage
neutron_p writes "We already know that NASA has prepared for space shuttle rescue mission if a crisis arises during Discovery's return to flight. NASA wants to avoid any risk, that's why they also installed 107 cameras which will film and photograph the orbiter's first two minutes of ascent from every angle scanning for pieces of insulation foam or ice fall off during the launch and strike the shuttle, the kind of damage that doomed its predecessor Columbia. Cameras will be installed around the launch pad and at distances of 6 to 60 kilometers (some 3.5 to 35 miles) away, as well as on board of two airplanes and on the shuttle itself."
If it explodes, we'll have enough angles to recreate an exact 3d model of what happend. COOL. If it doesn't, we still have enough to create a nice 3d model of the launch. This will push the wave of new 3d tv's... hmm... getting ahead of myself again.
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Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
Or maybe even more, anything which comes loose, will be discussed into great detail.
Anyway, rule of thumb: Great progress comes with risk. With the space shuttle, which about 20 years ago was great progress, the risk stays since there are no real developments.
The only question is: Is the spaceprogram worth the risk of flying with the space shuttle?
I personally think it is. I regret the attitude after the accident were complete risk aversion was shown. I would have gotten into the next space shuttle (err, can not pay for it, so they have to offer), and I am sure I would have returned safely (chance less then 1% on a deadly accident). The chance that the foam which caused this came loose and causes the damage is extremely small. Pieces of the shuttle fell off before (especially the ceramic tiles, lost a few per X flights), without problems.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
Going to space is dangerous, but beneficial. As soon as people realize that, we'll be much better off.
107 cameras seems a bit like overkill and perhaps an attempt to fix a "one in a million" problem that has already occurred.
Could you imagine if the western part of the United States was settled by people that needed 107 cameras pointed at their wagons to make sure that a wheel wasn't falling off before they left? Some people have an adventurous spirit. Let them adventure. Sometimes they die. Sucks, but true.
I'm a big tall mofo.
1. There is not that much usefull space in the space shuttle. For labwork they had the lab in the cargo bay for example.
2. Dynamics: You can not add random parts to the space station without changing its dynamice properties. Once you add a part, the harmonic frequencies are going to change, and you will have to recalculate the whole thing to check for problematic stress points and fatigue. (Ok, you think: Zero gravity, what stress, it floats by itself. In reality the spacestation is in a degrading orbit, so it has to be lifted once in a while, this uses thrusters which are carefully placed to boost the stations orbit. This also causes a lot of stress on the station!)
The harmonics are already a problem since not everything of the spacestation is in one plane, making it already very complex. The harmonics also dampen out pretty slow since there is not atmosferic friction (there are dampeners though).
Thus a continously added object like the spaceshuttle will be not add a lot in space, but will add a lot in complexity and weight, making the lift of the spacestation more complex and expensive, and will probably reduce the life time of the station.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
The point of the cameras is to determine if something broke on the shuttle. If something breaks the shuttle will not return to Earth. The cameras aren't there to say "OMG, SOMETHING WENT WRONG, ABORT." The cameras are there to determine if something went wrong and if so, to send the backup shuttle into space to return the astornauts safely to earth.
By having an extremely simple booster with low-to-modest performance and vast amounts of margin built in. This means pretty reliable, but it means not much room for growth and not much in the way of accomplishments. (What accomplishments they do have are because of the larger, and much less reliable and more expensive Proton - not the Soyuz.)You have to be careful there - the Russian have two spacecraft that they call Soyuz, don't confuse the two.
The Soyuz booster has indeed flown 2000-odd time, with a sucess rate of 98%. Oddly enough, thats the same sucess rate that the US has achieved.
The Soyuz capsule on the other hand, has flown only 90-odd times, and has had significant (life threatening) accidents no fewer then 8 times, plus two fatal accidents, plus about 8 loss-of-mission accidents.
That's a sucess rate no better than the US, and from some angles far worse. It's a sucess rate that in any other industry would cause headlines in 72-point type on a daily basis. (If 1% of 747 flights failed, there's be something like 20-30 747 crashes daily.)Umm... Maybe. Nobody knows how much a Soyuz (booster or capsule) flight actually costs. There's no direct conversion - and the prices they've quoted/charged have varied widely. No doubt not having to amortize the cost of your infrastructure helps, as does paying your engineers wages equivalent to your average third-world Nike sweat shop worker.