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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."
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
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.