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Debris Seen Falling Off Shuttle During Launch
kushboy writes "According to an article on CNN.com, there is video of debris falling off Discovery during its launch earlier today. While the debris does not appear to hit the shuttle, extra precaution and more video will be analyzed due to the Columbia mission of 2003. 'NASA has taken steps to minimize the amount and size of debris falling off the shuttle's exterior tank during its ascent. But the space agency has said it's impossible to eliminate falling launch debris.'"
From the Story summary:
From TFA:
Honestly, guys....do you even read submissions anymore?
Anyway, given the current technology, it's pretty much impossible to eliminate falling launch debris. We should know more about any possible damage by tomorrow, after the Discovery crew finish their VSE via boom-mounted camera.
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~ |rip/\/\aster /\/\onkey
Article title:
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Debris Seen Hitting Shuttle During Launch
Article summary:
While the debris does not appear to hit the shuttle . .
Seriously. I feel stupid complaining about the editors; I don't often. But this is ridiculous.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
If it is impossible to stop debris from hitting the shuttle, should everyone be so worried? Yes, there was the Columbia disaster, but doesn't the fact with all the new precautions in place debris still strike the shuttle suggest debris probably hit the shuttle on every previous launch, and with with no major problems.
The shuttle was designed to haul and return huge cargo loads. There is NOTHING else ever designed or built than can safely return an object from space the size of a school bus. This is a remarkable feat.
Now you can certainly argue the merits of the shuttle goals. But the shuttle is still a marvel of engineering.
How often does it actual return cargo? I can't think of too many times when it has. The problem is that it's a horrible compromise. The factors that make for a good cargo craft are quite dissemalar from what makes a good manned craft.
TODO: Something witty here...
This sort of thing is fairly common for shuttle launches in general, in a process which requires many component parts falling debris is inevitable. Of course, the close scrutiny of this launch will have made this coverage equally as inevitable. It appears to be some of the black undercovering of the shuttle just peeled away and fell to Earth. But NASA, ever cautious, says its might be the orbiters tiles themselves that are damage...needless to say its wise to take NASA's comments with a pinch of salt.
For those interested, heres the BBC article;
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4719847.stm/
Imagine what could be done if you guys weren't spending money on a war :(
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Sure it's not impossible, but it's impossible for a cost.
How many school buses are there in orbit?
(They tried unsuccessfully to send a teacher into orbit once, but she didn't get far.)
And speaking of these odd measurements, what is the difference (in size) between a schoo; bus and a regular bus? Or is that the standard because regular buses don't exist in the US. (adults drive their own SUV's, only kids ride a bus...
IT'S ALL ABOUT GOOD OL AMERICAN LIABILITY. If there is ONE thing that was preventable (a tile that was loose, a sensor in a tank, whatever...) the lawyers start sharpening their pencils and trying totake money away from NASA.
Go back to the old days....we're talking THE RIGHT STUFF days...these guys really weren't sure if they were coming back. That was part of what being an astronaut was! Yes, I made it to space, and I made it back, YIPPIE-KA-YAY MF!
I'm sure that NO astronaut WANTS to die, but I'm sure that they've all accepted the possibility...the VERY REALY possibility...that they might not come back.
We're not going to get anywhere if we don't take risks. Stupid risks are...well...stupid. BUT calulated risks are what made this country what it is today.
If we keep on this track, our kids won't be able to go outside without rubber-gloves and a face mask. We need to relax...we need to keep moving...and we can't be such chicken shits! We're a smart country...let's use our smarts and show CHINA that they're not the only country capable of having a functioning space program!
In the early design phases of the shuttle, the designers decided to go with solid fuel rather than liquid fuel to help keep the costs down. It seems to me in retrospect that if we'd launched both Challenger and Columbia on top of their boosters rather than strapped to the side then we'd still have a full complement of shuttles, saved a whole ton of money, and been four years further down the road than we are today.
I love these armchair rocket scientists that know more than the guys that actually built these things.
What makes you think that there would not have been other serious problems with a fully liquid-fueled shuttle system? I don't really think that you've just discovered the magic formula that those thousands of engineers overlooked. There would still have been a million other things that could have gone wrong in different ways.
The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
What makes you think it was so robust?
There were 12 manned Apollo missions, with a total crew of 36. One mission was lost (Apollo 1), at a loss of three crew. Another was very nearly lost (Apollo 13) resulting in a completely failed mission.
Up to and including the first shuttle accident, there were 25 manned flights with a total crew of around 122. That accident lost 7 crew.
So which really has the better record? And that's only counting up to the first accident. If you include all flights through the present, the shuttle's record is even better.
Any way you compare, lost crew ratio, lost mission ratio, even miles flown per loss, the shuttle is ahead of Apollo/Saturn in regards to crew safety and mission successes.
You need to learn how to construct an argument.
You can't claim the Shuttle is a shitty compromised bastard design, and then also say that NASA should have bought and used the Buran, which is the same sort of shitty compromised bastard design, except it lifts more and can fly itself, which is kinda cool but not all that groundbreaking.
Then you whine about the Shuttle's horribly risky reentry characteristics, characteristics it shares with the Buran, which you recommended NASA replace the Shuttle with.
Then you claim that the worst a capsule re-entry is much less risky, which is patently false. You can burn up a capsule with a re-entry angle which is too steep. Just like the Shuttle. (And Buran). You can skip off the atmosphere in a capsule with a re-entry angle which is too shallow. Just like the Shuttle. (And Buran).
And you'll have to supply a link to the alloys you claim will withstand 3000 deg F without massive reductions in their somewhat important physcial properties, like tensile strength and modulus of elasticity.
Theres a science to predicting failures (mainly by analyzing known failure rates of components of components, with enough work, you can determine the failure of the system as a whole).
Anyway, the Saturn's predicted failure rate wasnt all that great. I think there was something like a 1 in 3 chance (read this long ago) something would go catastrophically wrong with them.
Yeah yeah, people wax poetic about them, but the saturn boosters were a generation older than the shuttles, and much less reliable. They werent used often enough to meet their predicted failure.
Turns out the SSME's on the shuttle itself are among the most reliable rocket motors ever fielded, on any craft, with virtually no problems, and have been continually updated over the past 30 years.
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Ever since the Apolloe disaster, I have been convinced that you cannot walk up to a 30 or so story stack, hear the moaning and groaning of the equipment loaded with cryogenical propellants, and look up and say to yourself "Sure this is safe!". This fixation on "this fell off", etc. is a problem that will degrade what is left of the shuttle program. It doesn't matter what the safety is... Does anyone think there is a lack of folks applying to fly?
My wife doesn't listen to me either...
I just can't believe that with 16.2 BILLION they can't even keep pieces of the space shuttle from just falling off indiscriminately . IF an airplane such as the 747 were to have pieces falling off of it I'm sure that the FAA would have a fit until the problem was fixed and keep it from flying . This is our basic problem now . We just accept that things are going to break .Instead of builder a better mouse trap we just build five times as many to replace those that break and then train extra mouse trap layer to replace the ones who were injured when the springs flew off and got stuck in their eye .
I honestly don't believe that our moon landing would have taken place if the space program had the out and out lethargic nature it has taken on .
We need to have a kick in the butt . I mean come on the space shuttle can't even land on the moon . The only thing its good for is orbiting the earth . The president needs to drop the gauntlet for the defense contractors and tell them we need a reusable launch vehicle that has the capability to make an extraterrestrial landing .
I say we go back to the moon SOON and aggressively pursue that goal .
We need to do more than walk in space . We need to get to exploring the galaxy .
In the same sense that an overweight middle-aged man screaming at the top of his lungs...
"I am not ogling the barely covered ass of the 15 year old girl walking ahead of me!" as he walks through the mall would soon find himself being escorted off the property.
Any corporation that feels it necessary to tell me that it is "fair and balanced" is probably just the opposite.
- Loss of power in spacecraft due to lightning strike (Apollo 12)
- Failure to dock with the LEM which was overridden with brute force (Apollo 14)
- Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)
- Partial loss of the SPS (Apollo 17)
The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.
But don't let silly things like, oh, facts get in the way of all your flag-waving.
Oh, but don't let silly things like, oh, understanding the facts you presented from getting in the way of all your sophomoric insights.
The best thing that NASA could have done at the time to replace their shuttle fleet would have been to fund or buy Buran from the Russians when they ran out of money. the Russians built an amazing robot spaceplane in the 80's, something that NASA still has not achieved.
There was no neeed for a "robot spaceplane", and the the Buran was never intended to be used as a "robot spaceplane". Look, the shuttle could be remotely piloted, like any other aircraft. It's not because there's no point in remotely piloting a manned aircraft. The idea of remotely piloted manned aircraft was never popular in the US, even though the initial Soviet launch vehicles, specifically the Vostok. You can read all about it in Tom Wolfe's book The Right Stuff.
A simple example:
If the shuttle's re-entry angle is wrong, EVEN WITH NO DAMAGE, airframe stress becomes critical, it breaks up and everybody dies.
If a Russian space capsule's re-entry angle is wrong, they experience slightly higher G-forces and the pickup helicopter takes a couple of minutes longer to reach them after parachuting to earth.
Let me point out the obvious. A capsule isn't an airplane; The shape of the object helps to determine what stresses it can take. The Russian capsules are compact gumdrops. The shuttle is long and wide. Of course it has a different stress pattern. I'm not even an aerospace engineer, and I know that.
NASA's shuttle is a bastard design created from political compromise: the military wanted it, the scientists wanted it, the politicians wanted it. As a result it works for almost nobody
No argument here.
and is a 30-year old deathtrap. I'm suprised the loss rate has been so low - I have no idea what drugs NASA is ingesting, I'll be very suprised if this one isn't lost as well.
Your sleep at the local Holiday Inn not withstanding, you don't know what you're talking about. You have some individual facts, but you don't have any understanding of them. Come back when you're actually a rocket scientist, and not simply just playing one.
The shuttle should be killed and replaced ASAP, preferably taking some serious clues from bulletproof no-compromise brute simplicity Russian space engineering -
I'm dissing the Russian space program, they managed to keep Mir flying well beyond its intended lifespan, but they have no funding, not equipment, nothing. They're plenty smart, but don't have the ability to actually implement anything they design.
which is currently the best in the history of the world (until the Chinese or commercial sector catches up and passes them).
Yeah. That's why "Russian" is synonymous with well built dependable products, and not rusting, broken, semi-dependable, and kind of sad given their former greatness.
The world has seen that fabulous Russian engineering during the Cold War. Like the Chinese, they copied. The TU-144? The Concorde. The Buran? The space shuttle. The A-Bomb? Given to them by the Rosenbergs. Then there's the whole fiasco with the soviet engineers touring the American factory with special soles on their shoes to pick up metal filings for future analysis.
Coming back to the space program, my favorite quote from the movie version of The Right Stuff comes from an American general learning about Sputnik. He asks the scientist, "Are you telling me their Germans are smarter than our Germans?" Who got space first? The Germans.
I grew up during the 80s, and was told by the
Topic title: "Debris Seen Hitting Shuttle During Launch".
Summary: "While the debris does not appear to hit the shuttle"
While I understand that finding dupes and checking for facts or reading the article are hard work, would you please at least check that the title and summary do not state exactly opposite things ?
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Perhaps this is naive, but I really can't help but think that it's about time to replace the shuttle. (I'll list my reasons below)
1. Each shuttle was designed to have an operational life of 10 years, all have surpassed this age.
2. The shuttle has not had an admirable safety record - It was expected that 1 in each 100 flights would be unsuccessful and end in total failure (like Columbia) however 2 in 113 have ended in failure. I'm not sure what statistical distribution this was modelled on, but surely the number of failures are significantly larger than initially postulated.
3. The shuttle has intrinsic design flaws due to the politics of the cold war - it was hoped that the shuttle could be used for launching reconnaissance satellites and consequently the shuttle had to be fitted with a much larger cargo bay and develop vastly more thrust to deliver the large (approx. 18 tonnes) payloads to polar orbits. It was also hoped by the airforce (who demanded these changes) that after a single orbit the shuttle could land (should the mission be aborted), (against the wishes of NASA who preferred a "splash down") and so the shuttle was fitted with delta shaped wings that are prone to being stuck by debris due to their large size. As a result of all of this additional weight the shuttle had to be fitted with high thrust SRB's which are completely uncontrollable (unlike cryogenic propellants used by Apollo et al).
4. The shuttle sits on the side of its fuel tanks making a detachment impractical should an abort be called at lift off.
If safety concerns were paramount, the shuttle really should have been much smaller, with little wings sitting on top of a rocket propelled by cryogenic fuels.
Nothing sucks like a Vax, nothing blows like a PowerMac G4
You do understand that a chunk of insulation is what punched a hole in Columbia's wing right?
The problem here is they redesigned the insulation to avoid large chunks coming off, and here they now have video of a large chunk coming off the new design.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
Seems they took the wrong approach. If the insulation is no longer important at launch, why not just blow the whole lot of the insulation off before it launches, when a thorough camera-check of the Shuttle-surface can be taken for a few minutes before liftoff?