Slashdot Mirror
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."
the suits are defensive and pinheaded there
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Gotta love it when the critics come out of the woodwork. Even if the mission was completely flawless, they would still find something to carp about.
The mission wasn't flawless. If it had been, nobody would have had to stop work and spacewalk bits of things out of the heatshield. An hour of astronaut work up there is very, *very* costly. The time they took to make extra-sure the shuttle returns safely was a total waste of money.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Please get your facts straight.
":There's one thing being developed at the space station that is terribly important for manned space flight: a radiation shield"
So they are developing a "radiation shield" on the space station? I'm looking forward to reading the papers on this topic.
"When we went to the Moon, how big a ship we could take and how long we could stay were limited by exposure to the van allen belts."
And what L shell is the moon at? Like 57 or something? Radiation is certainly an issue at L shells of like 1.5-4 but beyond that it's a non issue.
"If we wanted to take a hundred people to the Moon we had to do it in 40+ trips cause any ship that could carry 100 people would expose them to radiation for too long."
Hum...your math lost me there.
"Having a station at the L1 libration point (where the gravity of the Moon and Earth meet)"
No, the L1 point is where the forces between the Earth and the Sun are balanced. We have a number of spacecraft there... ACE, SOHO, WIND, etc...
"would allow us to refuel, change ships and do science."
While your there would you please replace my thermal blankets and one of my SSDs, it's become pretty noisy. I'll gladly pay perdium.
"But you can forget about it if we have to make a radiation shield out of physical materials"
So what do you propose we make our shields out of? I guess I'm kind of behind the times on the un-physical-shielding-materials.
"So yeah, until we get that breakthrough"
in what?
"(and some breakthroughs in propulsion would be good too)"
agreed
"we won't have anywhere to go."
Does anything in your discussion have to do with where we go?
--
"Truth is much too complicated to allow anything but approximations"
"The shuttle may be "flawed" as you put it. Or maybe spaceflight is just dangerous?"
Everything is dangerous, including driving a car or dropping at thousands of miles an hour from orbit to sea-level. However, the purpose of enabling technology (like cars, or the space shuttle) is to protect us from that danger. If we're still dying that indicates the space shuttle isn't doing a good enough job. This could be because of one of two reasons - either (i) safe, reusable orbital insertion and landing is beyond our current level of technology, or (ii) the space-shuttle's crap.
Now, you don't hear much about Soyuz capsules coming apart on re-entry (and they're generally considered lower-tech than the shuttle), so that suggests the task is within the bounds of humanity's ability. Therefore, this suggests the shuttle is crap.
There are two reasons the shuttle could be crap - either it was always a bad design, or it's just been badly-maintained and used wrongly.
I don't know enough to judge if the shuttle was ever a good design, but I certainly don't remember major things always going wrong with it with the current stunning regularity. This (admittedly perceived) lack of regular major incidents in the past compared to the present-day rate suggests that in the past it was at least a bit more reliable.
Therefore, the only conclusion I can come to is that, whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, they aren't now. Whether they were badly-designed in the first place or they've just aged badly and the program's been starved of budget, they just aren't reliable any more.
"Do we really have reason to believe the next generation craft is going to be safer? If so, how much safer?"
Well yes - safety should be priority number one for reusable orbital vehicles. If they produce a ROV that's got a worse safety record than the shuttle I don't think it deserves the moniker "next generation".
"Life is risky you know. Hell, we can hardly build a bridge or a skyscraper without SOMEONE dying."
Yeah, but they tend to die working on it, not driving to the site every morning. And they tend to die singly, often from their own (or a co-worker's) mistake. I think you'll find that if construction workers regularly died in groups of 6-7, and did so because their hammers occasionally exploded and vapourised them, there might be a small public pressure to develop a safer hammer.
The problem is simple - whether or not the shuttle was ever any good, it isn't now. The design is rooted in the '70s, using '70s technology. Look at cars in the '70s, and look at them now - don't tell me we couldn't design a far, far more efficient, safe and cheap method of achieving orbit, even with a smaller budget than the shuttle program enjoyed.
All we can possibly lack is the budget (NASA has to pay through the nose to keep the creakingly ancient shuttle programme running), the will (new research is expensive, patches the holes is cheaper) and the political accord (as I recall, shuttle part maintenance is one big barrel of congressional pork, and intensely political in how it's managed).
The irony is that America was the clear winner of the space race, but it took its eye off the ball and stopped developing new enabling technologies. Now, maintaining its creaking infrastructure is so hamstringing any development efforts that you're in grave danger of being leapfrogged by the rest of the world, and are actually in the process of turning to private companies for the future of manned orbital missions...
Everything in moderation, including moderation itself