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Panel Challenges NASA Over Shuttle Safety
Uttini writes "NASA skipped some shuttle safety improvements as it tried to meet unrealistic launch dates for the first flight since the Columbia tragedy, some members of an oversight panel said in a scathing critique. Poor leadership also made shuttle Discovery's return to space more complicated, expensive and prolonged than it needed to be."
NASA isn't a magic organization. They can't turn turds into space shuttles in a week. There's really no news here, we knew that NASA was underfunded and overpressured to get this done.
"It is the stillest words which bring the storm. Thoughts that come with doves' footsteps guide the world."
Maybe it is time for new management.
The cake is a pie
When a single ISS beam costs $600 million, you gotta ask what they're spending their cash on.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
I am not oa rocket scientist but, looking at the present external tankdesign, it doesn't appear to be vacuum insulated.
I know it would add weight, but couldn't they have inner chambers to hold the fuel that are separated from the outer wall by a vacuum layer (like a thermos bottle)?
I think the weight difference would be offset by a safety factor -- namely less ice build up on the foam.
Ignorance is not a crime; neither should it be a way of life
Congress control $ = inmates run the asylum
To get people in to space affordably I vote for either Kliper or CRX.
The Russians just announced the Kliper launch targets, 2011 first unmanned flight and 2012 first manned flight. It will carry six so if it works its the best bet to actually fully man the ISS. It can't be over 3 people now due to the emergency lifeboat limit which is currently a Soyuz. At a 3 man crew very little research or manufacturing can be done.
CRX is essentially Burt Rutan's LEO successor to SpaceShipOne in partnership with Transformational space and under a small contract from NASA. CRX is not as well known as CEV. Its intended to just get people to and from LEO and the Space Station reliably, safely and affordably. Its a leader, follower NASA contractor. If the leader, which is I think Transformational and Scale succeeds they stay the leader, if they fail the followers move up on the funding ladder. A real improvement in competition over NASA's usual approach which is just pick between Boeing, Lockheed or a consortium of the big names.
As for the grandparent's assertion that NASA's problem is not enough money THAT is absurd. NASA has squandered $100 billion and heading for $160 billion on the ISS by 2010. The Shuttle averages over its life $1.3 billion a launch. Its the most expensive launcher in history.
NASA's problem is waste not insufficient funding. If its budget is getting cut by the politicians its because they to waste much doing to little in their manned space program. Of course politicians in Florida, Texas, Utah and Mississippi, in particular, fan the flames by encouraging NASA to maintain bloated payrolls so they have lots of nice jobs in their states and districts. The Shuttle and ISS are great for a bloated payroll, jobs program. In that regard they will be missed. The danger is new programs like CEV will have to maintain the same bloated payroll to win political and budget support. If you keep the bloated payroll the bloated launch costs will live on.
@de_machina
Try reading this for some provocative reasons why ity's a big waster of time: http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhe re.htm
"In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong."
I keep hearing that if they used environmentally unfriendly foam (CFC's I would suppose). Does anyone know the veracity of this or shed any light on the situation with the foam?
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
Alright, I've got a question that I haven't seen addressed, at all, anywhere.
We've spent God knows how many hundreds of millions of dollars trying to make the shuttle safe enough for human spaceflight. Maybe that just isn't going to happen. Not with the shuttle, not with the fact that we're looking at band-aids and not limb replacement solutions here.
So, what would it take to make the shuttle run on autopilot? Rockets fly to space all the time, Russian Progress vehicles even dock with the space station, although I'm not sure if they do it alone or via teleoperation.
Either way, why not invest a certain amount of money in an autopilot (or teleoperation) system so the shuttle could fly up, dock with the station, and then could be entered by ISS crew who could use the shuttle's robotic arm, etc., to set up the next component of the station. If manpower's an issue (and with 2 on board the station, it probably is) you could do it when there was a crew change and there were more people at the station, or you could really, really hurry with the CEV and wait until you could have enough people at the station to do the job.
Or, for that matter, you could just HOLD on station construction until the CEV was ready and you could squeeze enough people into the station to make this work.
This would solve the main issue: that the shuttle isn't safe for humans due primarily to reentry problems. In the future, you could even have the CEV dock with an in-space, unmanned shuttle and complete shuttle missions, such as a Hubble servicing mission, then undock, let the shuttle make its way home (or, in an unfortunate, but no longer life-threatening event, crash) and the CEV, with crew, would return to earth safely (as I can't recall a SINGLE EVENT where a capsule has burned up and people have died in reentry.)
Anybody know why this hasn't been suggested, at all? I think it may be cheaper and faster, certainly if we'd done this after the Columbia disaster, but even fi its not, it allows us to keep on using the shuttle for YEARS relatively cheaply.
Tim
The shuttle may be "flawed" as you put it. Or maybe spaceflight is just dangerous? Do we really have reason to believe the next generation craft is going to be safer? If so, how much safer?
A lot of people tend to assume that space travel is inherently dangerous, but that isn't necessarily true. Just look at the Russian Soyuz, which hasn't had a fatality since 1971.
The shuttle IS set to be scrapped, but we have to complete the space station before that can happen.
Why? There's no way that the benefit we'll get from the ISS will be worth the cost. Although it's been great for pork-barrel politics, the benefits of the ISS to science and exploration are rather dubious:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/391/2
If the main concern is keeping the promises we've made to our international partners, I'm fairly certain that we can offer them other things which will cost us far less than completing the ISS with the shuttle.
"But why does it have to be so big?"
I know this is rhetorical, but it ended up so big because of DOD requirements to win their approval and participation. They need a big cargo capability AND worse they demanded a 1000+ mile cross range landing capability to launch from Vandenburgh, do 1 polar orbit and land back at Vandenburgh. To do this the Shuttle wings had to be dramatically enlarged, which led to the whole thing getting much bigger. Since the $6 billion launch pad at Vandenburgh was abandoned after Challenger, in fact the DOD largely abandoned the Shuttle at this point, the irony is this cross range capability was never really needed.
"And also put that doohickey on the very top like with the Saturn V. What's it for? It's a little escape pod rocket and parachute to get the people the fuck away from the big explosive bits if something really bad happens."
Transformational and Burt Rutan's CRX design has a good point on this. They are proposing an air launch at 25,000 ft. The advantage is if there is a problem when lighting the first stage its easy to get the capsule away in any direction and there is plenty of time to open parachutes to soft land the capsule or even have the crew bail out of the capsule if there is a problem with the capsule chutes.
Its actually pretty challenging to safely get the capsule clear from booster if there is major failure on a launch pad, and get it high enough for the parachutes to safely deploy.
The problem with CRX is it takes a BIG plane, 747 class, to carry an LEO capable launch stack to 25,000 feet. On the plus side the mother ship saves 10-25% of the fuel needed to get to orbit versus a ground launch
The CRX URL above is a great read because its short, concise, innovative but more importantly you can see they are totally focused on safety, simplicity, low cost and reliability which is the antithesis of Shuttle thinking for the last 30 years.
"Only the engines are the big monetary per-launch loss,"
If you air launch at high altitude you can build a much cheaper engine. The Falcon/CRX VAPAK concept heats and presssurizes the Propane fuel so it pushes itself out of the tank. Couple this with high altitude and you don't need expensive turbopumps to pressurize the fuel. This dramatically simplifies and lowers cost of the booster. You can't do this with from a launch pad because the atmospheric pressure makes it harder to get the fuel out of the tank.
@de_machina
The shuttle IS flawed. The side-by-side configuration is dangerous. Much more dangerous than the shuttle-on-top configuration.
No amount of money is going to change the fact that anything going wrong with any part of the shuttle is going to cascade and damage something else that is sitting right next to it.
We don't have to complete the space station either. We can let it fall into the ocean. The world won't end if that happens, and we can get on to REAL exploration instead. Or, we could finish it with different technology. The Shuttle can't lift any more weight than an itty-bitty Delta, so it's a crappy vehicle to lift the space station to orbit.
The Shuttle-B next gen spacecraft is the way to go. We could launch the ISS in a handful of flights instead of the dozens that it's taken.
Scrap the shuttle NOW. Spaceflight is dangerous, but don't fool yourself. The shuttle isn't helping at all.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
I'd mod you up if I hadn't already posted. Even though I think re-usable vehicles are the way to go rather than expendables, I agree totally with you that the Shuttle is just Designed Wrong -- and isn't very reusable anyway.
As for "make a big Saturn V style launcher with cheap ass solids strapped around the bottom for the initial heavy lift", there's no need for the solids. A Saturn V could put the equivalent of four full Shuttle payloads into LEO (Low Earth Orbit) in one shot, or a complete Shuttle Orbiter. Or, for that matter, Skylab. Or a fully fueled S-IVB stage, LM, and CSM, all set for a trip to the Moon. That thing (the SV) had 7.5 million pounds of liftoff thrust, the Shuttle has about 5.
The original plan was only for Shuttle to replace medium-lift launchers, retaining the Delta at the low end and Saturn V at the high end. NASA quickly scrapped that plan (along with the Saturn V stacking capability in the VAB and the Saturn V launch towers) when they realized that the existance of a working manned and heavy lift capability (Apollo-Saturn) meant it would be politically easy to cancel Shuttle if (when) that hit budget overruns.
-- Alastair
Most of this work was under O'Keefe. Griffin will take a while to get hold of all this and change it, but the shake up is occuring. Thank God. O'Keefe was a disaster as he appointed a bunch of managers/politicians (read PHBs) under him rather than engineers.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"The foam has fallen off on all 200 some flights"
I think its more like 114 flights.
Do you work for NASA? They said the same thing and used it to rationalize doing nothing about it until Columbia. They were really panicky about it when they saw tile damage in all the early launches, but hey they landed OK. After a while since they kept getting away with it they made the assumption it was OK. They were wrong. There is a scathing indictment of your attitude by Feynman.
Basically NASA was shooting craps with the foam because its always been dangerous and on Columbia they rolled snake eyes.
Space flight IS dangerous but that is no reason to let fixable problems that heighten that danger go unfixed. The only contradiction to this point is the foam and tile damage may not be fixable. They may be a fundamental design flaw which means you either abandon the design or keep shooting craps.
@de_machina
It was the switch to foam that isn't manufactured with freon in 1999 that led to the Columbia tragedy. NASA knew that the new foam shed more than the old foam but ignored the problem
Please, do a little research.
Learn the difference between BX-250 and BX-265. Discover for yourself what foam compound was used for ET-93.
Here. Maybe this will help...
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/shuttle-02d.html
I doubt you are a engineer, let alone an aerospace engineer.
I'm not an aerospace engineer, but I am an engineer. I'm an engineer who believes in redundant systems and simple solutions over "space hardened" systems. There are lots of examples of guys building working systems on shoestring budgets that last well beyond their engineered lifetimes. Check out http://www.hypocrites.com/article2897.html for just one example. I also cite a story from the Apollo days when Joe Shea vetoed a crazy design for measuring the remaining fuel in the fuel tanks of Apollo spacecraft. Instead of using a nuclear detector to measure fuel in a weightless environment (page 8), he chose a design based on one found in his Karman Ghia. They installed reserve fuel tanks capable of getting the crew home, and always made sure that they were within their limits.
I find it interesting that NASA always talks about how they fly the most complex systems in the world, yet somehow its the Russians with their 40 year old designs that have the most reliable systems.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
If you look at how small the budget is, compared to the (illegitimate) war in Iraq is costing and how much it will cost in the future. I reckon that an 'economy' based on how Earth runs in StarTrek would be great. I know that managers would be bored, coz everyone else would tell them to get stuffed :D
Someone else mentioned that russia hasnt had a fatality since 1971, but all the soyuz missions do is launch people (or supplies), they dont launch both, with a nice big arm, and a huge bay for storing large things that simply will not fit anywhere else
Could it be they're doing something right, that we aren't? Is it absolutely necessary to have a man-rated launch AND reentry vehicle, with live astronauts on board, just to deliver supplies, and bring back garbage? Couldn't we just double the number of Soyuz craft docked at the station, and maintain a larger crew, and just send up supplies using multiple big dumb boosters? That way, if we lose a supply run, big deal, just light up the next one. Right now, we have problems with the shuttle, and the astronauts stuck on the ISS have to start counting calories and oxygen generators...