Discovery's Dangling Gapfiller Removed by Hand

Cyclotron_Boy writes "According to the New Scientist and NASA TV, Discovery's gap-fillers were removed successfully by hand by astronaut Steve Robinson earlier today during the eva. They didn't even have to use the forceps or the makeshift hacksaw-blade tool."

Comments

Re:If you still needed proof of the lemon, here it

[prisoner-of-enigma]

The Russians have the much cheaper and safer soyuz, not because they are especially smarter, but because they just cannot afford to run their shuttle.

The Russians understand something that NASA does not, namely that their technology is limited and thus must be overengineered for saftey. Everything about the former Soviet space program was overdesigned for a reason, just like our Saturn V was: to give good safety margins without going gonzo with costs. If you've got four engines making enough thrust to get you into orbit, you add a fifth for safety and then run all your engines at 80% rated thrust for even more safety. Is it efficient? No, but it's safer.

Now, I'm not about to argue that space exploration is, or ever should be, perfectly safe. That is obviously absurd. However, the more of a design margin you have, the less meticulous you have to be when preparing to launch the vehicle. Almost all the cost overruns in the shuttle program are due to the incredible number of inspections and maintenance needed to turn a shuttle around. With a throwaway booster, you don't have any of that. Sure, you're junking valuable hardware every time you launch with a throwaway booster, but it actually costs less to do it that way. Why do you think commercial satellites are launched on Delta rockets instead of the shuttle?

Take a modern top-fuel dragster as an example. It is designed to do one thing: go as fast as you can in one quarter of a mile. Everything inside the engine is designed to last roughly just that distance, and it is torn down and rebuilt pretty much completely between every run. It is, in essence, a throwaway booster. Dragster teams do it this way because it is impractical to build an engine that can survive multiple runs and be competitive. Sure, it's expensive. But losing the race is even more expensive.

NASA needs to get away from giving us a Ferrari of a shuttle, with all its myriad valves, camshafts, and amazingly expensive maintenance, and instead give us a slightly-updated version of the 60's-era Chevy Big Block. Sure, a Ferrari can get 400hp out of a 2.5-liter engine, but it must use exotic techniques to do so. A big block V8 can make 400hp all day long without working hard, and it costs pretty much an order of magnitude less to construct and maintain. We need the Chevy, not the Ferrari, if we're going to get back into space on a large scale.