Discovery Prepares for Return

Kailash Nadh writes "Discovery's astronauts packed up their stuff on Friday as they prepared to undock from the international space station now that NASA has cleared the shuttle to return to Earth next week. Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay. Once back on Earth, the items would either be disposed of or returned to researchers."

Comments

Unmanned flights

[roman_mir]

NASA is going to freeze the Shuttle program, but I wonder, Shuttle can fly without anyone on-board, so isn't it possible to do that? Just use the damn thing as a cargo vehicle without people on board. Or have one pilot on it who will take it up, and then if the thing is damaged, have it fly back automagically, and let the pilot stay on the space station and go down with a Soyuz crew.

Re:Unmanned flights

[TMonks]

Saying "the shuttle can fly without anyone on board" is very similar to someone asking why we even need commercial pilots, since the planes can take off, fly, and land themselves. If anything were to go wrong with the shuttle, you might not lose over a hundred passengers, but you still lose over a billion dollars in investments. IMHO, Having people on board to make sure that everything is going right is absolutely necessary to protect that investment. After all, how would you feel if an unmanned shuttle performed beautifully in its mission and re-entry, only to crash and burn on the runway, a problem that could have easily been solved with human intervention?

Why is this filed under 'Science'

[fuzzy12345]

I wasn't watching around the clock, but I saw no evidence of any science being done at all on this mission.

NASA uses the word 'science' as a figleaf. What they mainly do is engineering, and they badly do what they should have perfected 20 years ago.

Microchips have become routine, brain surgery has become routine, but in 'rocket science' there's been no progress. It's a process and internal culture issue, and it isn't being fixed.

Re:Hauling The Trash...

[jridley]

"hurl this stuff into the sun"

Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.

Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.

Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?

The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.

Re:Aldrin

[cahiha]

I think having people with (successful) field experience in the decision structure is tremendously important.

People with field experience should be consulted when the situation warrants it, but making the "part of the decision structure" is probably not a good idea. Astronauts have already demonstrated by their participation in the program that they are willing to make irrational sacrifices for a ride into space. Participation of people with that kind of psychological profile only risks wasting more money on unnecessary space flights.

Decisions about the shuttle program should be made by impartial and disinterested scientists and engineers, in a broadly-based peer review process, based on the scientific and technological merits alone.

Note that Aldrin doesn't seem to question the merit of manned space travel, only the vehicle.