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Shuttle to Launch Despite Objections
sam0ht writes "NASA has just named July 1st as the launch date for the space shuttle Discovery, a year after the last shuttle mission. Last July's mission was the first since the break-up of Columbia in 2003, but after foam again broke away from the main tank, the shuttle fleet was grounded. More foam has been removed from the main tank, but NASA staff are divided over whether this is enough to ensure the flight's safety, with some reporting that both the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching again so soon. Managers want to make only one major change at a time, and plan that if damage does occur, the crew would be able to stay in the International Space Station, to which they are delivering supplies, rather than trying to land a damaged shuttle."
What a great way to celebrate my birthday!
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?
-:sigma.SB
WARN
THERE IS ANOTHER SYSTEM
If this group was in charge of the appolo missions we'd still be doing near earth orbital testing.
Space is dangerous, expensive, and offers very few good opportunities. If you want to get anywhere you have to take risks. I'm not saying that people should just throw their lives away for nothing, but every trip they make into space breaks new ground and teaches them new lessons. If you want the rewards you have to be prepared to walk away with a bloddy nose now and again, especially in a game like this.
It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe, it's just plain never going to happen. Right now I think we should be happy with 90%. From a purely practical perspective, if a dozen people lose their lives to accellerate the space program 10 years, I would call that a good trade. And I'd be happy to be one of those 12.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Ignoring engineers hasn't got the Shuttle very far in the past. From the Challenger Wikipedia article:
Good. About friking time I had a new wallpaper for my 3840 x 1024 desktop.
Each time the shuttle goes to the ISS I get new wallpaper.
That might be just about the best thing to come out of the ISS program. *sigh*
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Happened to research into a new orbital platform...?
From space.com:
Two senior NASA managers - chief engineer Chris Scolese and Bryan O'Conner, the associate administrator of Safety and Mission Assurance - did have concerns over the potential risk of foam debris posed by a number of insulated ice frost ramps along Discovery's external tank, NASA officials said.
About 34 foam-covered ice frost ramps line the shuttle fuel tank, insulating brackets that connect a cable tray and pressurization line.
"From their particular discipline, they felt they wanted their statement to be No-Go," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations said. "But they do not object to us flying and they understand the reasons and the rationale that we laid out in the review for flight."
Glad to know there's someone with a set of balls at NASA.
If we wait for everything to be 100% iron-clad safe, we'll never leave this rock.
There's always going to be a nay-sayer somewhere up the chain. Beurocrats get so uptight about their jobs that that they'd never greenlight anything, for fear of being accountable for something (feds are 100% allergic to accountability, anyone who's ever worked a government contract will know this).
Godspeed and have some fun up there.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It is not clear why we still need the shuttle at this point. The shuttle is really not a tool for manned exploration of space because all it does is orbit, and its continuing scientific contributions are dubious, as well. Most if not all of the missions that the shuttle is used for could be accomplished by robots (with the exception of repair missions such as Hubble and the missions where the objective is to "determine the effect of weightlessness on the human body"). I think we should just scrap the shuttle at get to work on real technologies such as field propulsion that will get people excited about the space program again. If we stop wasting money on shuttle missions, maybe we won't be stuck with this stone-age chemical rocketry for another 50 years.
The shills shrill yet again. Hopefully you will be arrested, tried, and executed for high treason.
The ISS project is dying on it's backside without the shuttle and we need the fleet to get operational as soon as possible. Yes, there is danger but there always will be with space travel. The astronauts know this and accept it and if they want to step down there are plenty more qualified people eager for the chance. But these issues highlight a larger problem. We need a new space vehicle - the space shuttle was always a pale shadow of what it could have been. If we are to get the ISS functioning properly and go onwards to the Moon we'll need either a much heavier lifting platform or a totally new way of getting into orbit.
Not even good enough to rate as flame bait. How terribly boring your life must be.
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing. If it has to get the funding and upgrades it needs as 'plan B' so be it, it's still funding.
Time and time again NASA illustrates the things that can go perfectly right and horribly wrong when engineers and pioneers are held accountable to politicians via managers/beauracrats.
Sometimes it works. Kennedy told them to put a man on the moon, and they did it. They were tasked in the 70's with making a reusable spacecraft, they did pretty good for a first project, especially getting it to last damn near 30 years. Then in the 80's they were tasked with long term space visits, had some help with that, but got it done still.
Now the managers are no longer managing but worrying about political decisions. Without good management the actual work stalls as the geeks don't know what to work and jump ship.
I'm torn as to how to resolve this. I don't want public money going to private companies, nor do I want to see it squandered in a dinosaur of an organization.
At the very least acknowledge that NASA has some issues and see what we can do to ease any restrictions against private companies moving into orbit and sharing with them research that was done with public money at NASA.
The failure rates are like 1 to 75-100 compared to the Project Constellation 1 to 2000.
The main reasons that killed the shuttle was safely, costs, lost of life and other payload rockets like the Ariane, Atlas and so on. I think a few years from now SpaceX will have most control over payload rockets.
Just like your spelling!
I thought that you left /.? Apparently not.
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station (having trashed the working, reliable, relatively inexpensive and more powerful Apollo launcher for the unreliable, outrageously expensive Shuttles), or a reliable means of emergency escape, the ISS is limited to 3 crewmembers on a longterm basis. That's barely enough staff to keep the station running, which means there's virtually no science taking place aboard the station.
I say abandon the ISS now, along with the Shuttles, and divert those tens of billions of dollars into designing and building a state-of-the-art launcher utilizing the lessons learned from the successful Apollo program and those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. Or spend that money on researching and developing tech which could dramatically lower the cost of access to space, such as carbon nanotube structures or new propulsion technologies. Either would be a far better use of taxpayer money than the useless ISS or the expensive, unreliable Shuttle, which I believe are now up to a billion dollars a launch, making them the most expensive launcher ever by a wide margin. We could launch fleets of astronauts into space aboard Russia's safer Soyuz booster for the price of a single Shuttle launch. Like the ISS, the Shuttle is a crippled dog and needs to be put out of its (and our) misery.
joke
/\
o -- your head
+
"Managers want to make only one major change at a time, and plan that if damage does occur, the crew would be..." uh, yeah, the crew would the people who thought that launching was a good idea.
It's not a question of hormones. NASA is willing to take risks. NASA management however has a skewed understanding of their incentive, which results in the wrong things for the wrong reasons. We have built a system which costs dramatically more to fly than the nation is willing to spend. It costs so much to fly that we have reduced our expectations and plans over and over and over to fit within the flight budget, even as monies are re-allocated from doing stuff to flying the Shuttle. This silliness must stop.
Every time the Shuttle flies, we fall about six months further behind where we could be. We still have not started to think about replacing it with a system that will deliver reliable, inexpensive and frequent access to space. The capsule replacement on the drawing board won't be inexpensive and it won't fly frequently. It's a stop-gap measure to provide access to the International Space Station, assuming the Shuttle can fly without disaster something like 18 more times to finish the construction. That is definitely not certain. The loss of only one more orbiter -- even in a ground accident as has nearly happened -- will make it all but impossible to finish construction of the ISS.
If you think human and other activity in space is important then you should be in favor of immediate cancellation of the Shuttle program. I don't know what sort of wake-up call that Congress and NASA need to get the hint, but we really need to start working on a next generation system right now.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
They got the Shuttle to last nearly 30 years by flying it dramatically less often than planned, and spending dramatically more than planned to fly it at all. Reliable, frequent, and affordable access to space can only happen by euthanizing the Shuttle program.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
Maybe a small cockpit, in a capsule that could eject would be smart.
While that used to be true, It seems like more and more the party is being neo-coned. As if it was not bad enough that they have hijacked the republicans, now they seem to want to control libertarians as well.
I like that!
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
I'm sure I'll get slammed for this but, well who cares. I remember watching the first shuttles go up. It seemed like we flew a lot of shuttle missions without any problems (sans Challenger, I know BIG PROBLEM). The point is that it seems like problems are far more common now with all of the new tech and more importantly lessons learned than in the old days.
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with? Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to? I haven't seen anything to tell me why it seems we can't launch a shuttle without something faling off when the old ones flew without a publicized hitch.
Anyone?
The moonshot was a "fuck money, whatever it takes to get there" project. They got the best people, the best equipment, priority funding and restrictions simply didn't exist. Success was paramount. Failure was no option, whatever the cost, no failure may happen, for this is a fight of ideology.
Now, this changed big time. NASA gets the people it can afford, it gets the equipment the contractors that bid lowest and offer the best counter-contracts offer, they receive funding whenever something's left from the bomb budget and they have to deal with environmental restrictions and people complaining about the noise of their testing facilities.
Space flight has turned from a prestige object into a business. It has to try to be profitable. Now, it is VERY hard to actually be directly profitable in manned space flight. The moonshot did boost economy and quickened development in many, military as well as civilian, areas, especially we, in the IT biz, would be far from where we're today without the space program.
But today, everything, even science, has to be profitable. That's the big problem with the NASA today. They aren't "worse" than they were in the 60s, they don't slack or work more sluggish. It's just not space race time anymore.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The general, non-science following population needs to be able to see a tangible goal for each launch in order to make it seem worthwhile to them. Until we can provide them a better goal, resupplying and manning ISS is something they view as a goal.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
I came across this site with images of the shuttle rollout to the launch pad. A few pages in are some panoramics as well. Whatever its technological flaws, the shuttle is pretty to look at. I wish everyone involved the best until we can get the shuttle's replacement off the ground!
I would suggest you and all the other morons on here actually do some research instead of spouting off. The incidence of foam hitting the shuttle is extremely high and has occured since the beginning, if flights had continued at the same rate as they occured at the start of the shuttle program we would have had many more critical hits. If you don't believe me, ask NASA. Or better yet, read the emails and information that was available to the team members during the Columbia mission:
/ en/common/item_detail.jhtml?id=305032
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02
This is the same damn problem they've had since the beginning--only they've continued to make changes without enough testing. The fact that they recently altered the foam is good cause to be even more cautious.
And to the people denouncing the engineers and gov't workers and accountability on this thread, get a clue and pick on another agency. NASA -- the entire agency -- is highly accountable for failed missions from the top on down because it relies on image and public support. The higher ups are accountable to a congress that wants more frequent launches and toys with the budget and priorities--and has a short memory with regard to why we have such a moronic shuttle design. The engineers are doing their job, they did it during columbia, they did it during challenger. In both cases management failed and senior management was fired/retired/encouraged to leave. So spare me the covering-their-asses mentality.
You do not talk about Shuttle Flight Club.
God spoke to me.
Think the controversy has to do with the ice ramps on the side of the tank. They have seen some accumulation of ice on these ramps. Yet, these particular ramps have not caused a failure in the past. Given that there have already been changes I think management at nasa is reluctant to add more variables to the launch. The management looked at the historic probabilities over a hundred or so flights. Until more data is gathered on the ice ramps proving there is an issue, then change them.
My problem is, I think there should be a skeleton crew on these test flights.
Looking forward to seeing ISS completed and shuttle retired. On to the constellation program!
By the way, ISS can have many uses. eg. researching how full a liquid fuel tank is in space. ( or any liquid tank ) There are numerous research possibilities -- just requires some imagination and real problems...
Anyhow, if the shuttle does blow then its over for the shuttle. That is right from the administrators mouth.
So that explains NASA's recent troubles. (At least ScuttleMonkey isn't in the NSA.)
If the next shuttle explodes then just blame it on their O/S.
Where's the 0xBEEF
> Spending money on the ISS is a good thing
No, it isn't. The ISS is worthless pork.
> They were tasked in the 70's with making a reusable spacecraft, they did pretty good for a first project
No, they didn't. They were tasked to make a spacecraft that could go into orbit every _week_, and they made one that goes into orbit every _year_. And it's not reusable; at best it's remanufacturable. An F-16 is reusable. An SR-71 is reusable. Spaceship-One is reusable. Anything that needs 100 hours of maintenance for every hour of operation isn't.
The reason they were told to make it reusable was so that it would be _cheaper_, but they made something much much more expensive. That's abject failure, not success.
> especially getting it to last damn near 30 years.
No, they didn't. If I keep a car in the garage and only drive it once a year, of course it'll last 30 years. It would be impressive if they did what they promised: make a system you could frequently use for a long period. It doesn't fly enough to wear out - that's utter failure, not success.
> Then in the 80's they were tasked with long term space visits, had some help with that, but got it done still.
Something the Soviets did, better, safer, on a shoestring budget, a decade earlier. When you're a decade behind the clunkly old Soviet Union, makers of the Chernobyl reactor and the Lada Riva, that's total failure, not success.
And when the hi-techiest agency in the hi-techiest country in the world has to DEPEND (it's not help, it's dependance) on the Jules Verne era Russian space program just so its astronauts can eat and drink and breathe, that's complete failure, not success.
> I don't want public money going to private companies
Private companies built the F-117 and the Sears Tower and the Internet. Private companies succeed because if they don't, they're destroyed. NASA fails because it's allowed to survive its failures.
> At the very least acknowledge that NASA has some issues
NASA is the issue. It should have been abolished in 1970. It's 36 years past its best-before date. Scrap it, scrap ISS, scrap STS, scrap the whole weird crypto-soviet command-economy model of US government space operation and go back to doing things the way Americans are really good at - open competition in a free market.
...a good possible use for the remaining shuttles is to launch them unmanned and somehow attach them to the ISS or park them near by for other uses. On the ground sitting still they are OK. Up in space floating around they are OK. The transition in and out of the atmosphere is where they *blow goats*, so do that one more time with no humans in them. As already-up-in-space vehicles and as work/living space they are fine,and they are already built and functional. I say move them to orbit one last time and never return them back down, haul some cargo up with the last launches of them but stop risking humans in them with launches and reentry nonsense. Comes a time to cut your potential losses. Just the savings over the next few years would do wonders for NASA's budgets and to help re-fund a lot of the unmanned satellite jazz they are dropping-because the shuttle sucks down most of their cash. Spend the time designing the next replacement vehicle, and let the Rooskies haul the folks back and forth, they got the rig that works for that.
The CEV is not intended to bring a serious reduction in the cost of access to space. It will probably be less expensive to fly than the current Shuttle, and it might be possible to fly it as often as a couple times a month if needed, but it is not a next-generation space access system. CEV is needed, but it is not all that is needed.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
What's the worst that can happen?
the more they over-think the plumbing the easier it is to stop up the pipe
The top guys who know what they're doing KNOW it's a bad idea, but management says do it anyway.
Said management is definately looking a little pointy-haired.
I think the space program is very important. We can't let ocassional failures stop our progress into space. If they do see a problem they can, like they said, just wait at the space station for rescue. Humans learn from mistakes.
This article should not have been published without a link to Maciej Ceglowski's excellent analysis, Rocket to Nowhere. It seems to answer a lot of questions folks have here.
A quote: "Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.
As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process."
"Managers want to make only one major change at a time, and plan that if damage does occur, the crew would be able to stay in the International Space Station"
Astronauts: So we're safely out of the damaged ship, so how do we get back now?
Ground Control: Dunno, we only make 1 large change at a time.
There's nothing Intelligent about Intelligent Design.
How many thousands gave their lives to explore new frontiers just a few hundred years ago? I'm all for making space travel as safe as possible, but NASA has just become one big bureaucratic mess. With all the red tape & bullshit, we'll be lucky is NASA gets to the moon again in the next millenium.
http://science-fair-projects.qctx.com/
Needs Another Seven Astronauts...
.......and just kill the astronauts here on the ground. Why spend billions just to kill them in space?
Since the safety manager and the engineers cannot get them to not launch, they should ask for the launch date to be moved to July 4th. That way when there is an accident and things blow up, they can say that those managers who forced the launch despite the engineer's objections, all planned it as a part of their "Independence Day fireworks celebration".
That would get those morons fired really fast.
Here we go again. This sentiment appears repeatedly in every Slashdot discussion about the US manned space program. Yes, manned spaceflight is dangerous. The problem I have with NASA is that they make it needlessly dangerous.
The Shuttle is terrible: solid rockets (can't be throttled or shut off), TWO solid rockets (it will cartwheel if one of them doesn't light), no launch escape system, and fragile re-entry surfaces exposed to falling ice (and birds!) during launch. And the new CEV will be little better. It will still use a solid rocket, and it has only one engine, so there's no one-engine-out capability. Werner von Braun had it right: manned rockets should have multiple, liquid-fuelled engines.
And going back to the Moon would be a lot safer if we sent robots first, to build a manned habitat and make it safe and ready to occupy BEFORE sending people there. I think this is doable; in light of the DARPA Grand Challenge and Japan's work on robots. Also, imagine the spinoffs from this sort of technology.
install small nets with many "floors" in order to catch the falling objects
LOL!
Oh, sorry. You were serious? There's a thing called laminar flow which tends to be disturbed by thousands of little nets. These nets also need to be made of some material with extremely high tensile strength so they don't just rip apart in the airstream. Oh and to make matters worse, what happens when your "net" actually "catches" a piece of debris? The piece of hull where the net is attached is suddenly ripped out, and debris, net and all decide to leave the shuttle. Or assuming a successful "catch", the sudden asymmetric drag suddenly sends the vehicle into an unstable flight. Oops!
IANAAE (I am not an aerospace engineer), but I don't think this would work.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Yeah we do; it's called the Soyuz. There's no reason why we can't just build a bunch of them instead of continuing to launch overgrown school buses at the thing!
See, that's the big problem with NASA. They're stuck in this stupid mentality where they think they either have to use the Shuttle or design something brand new and impossibly perfect. That's a false dichotomy. Any replacement for the Shuttle doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the Shuttle. Freakin Apolllo fits that description; they could just build some more of those! And all they'd have to do is change the shape of the hatch to be compatible with the ISS and run the sucker off a graphing calculator instead of the heavy 60's-era computer technology.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
And I'm not saying that only because I'm an engineer. :-)
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
What if the problem occurs during lift-off? They can just go to the space station?
If the problem happens after they are in space, and they actually manage to get to the space station, is there enough room/provisions for all of these extra people? For how long? How do we pick them up?
The status of the shuttle fleet:
- Challenger - Blown up
- Columbia - Blown up
- Enterprise - Stripped for parts and now a museum piece
- Endeavour - Still undergoing testing to possibly be ready for flight late this year
- Discovery - That's the one they're leaving in
Can't they see the problems here? C'mon guys, it isn't rocket science (heh heh!), it's common sense!!By the way, NASA management ignored the engineers who told them it was too cold to launch Challenger on its final voyage. They launched anyway. Then they blamed the engineers. (I watched a program about the whole fiasco on The Discovery Channel a couple of years ago. Google is your friend if you want specifics...)
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
You need to search a bit...
n /crew-6/ndxpage9.html for example.
n /crew-6/hires/s113e05433.jpg in particular
:D
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/statio
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/statio
See?
Nice, expensive wallpaper.
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
You forgot one.... Atlantis.
Also you could send a Soyuz capsule or two (one at at a time...limited docking ports) up to bring them back. In addition there is a capsule up there for an emergency return situation (ISS crew)already isn't there? You would just have to replace it later.
got any facts to back your rant up? 'institutionalized bureaucracy'? 'just trying to preserve their jobs'? Please, you sir know nothing about the individuals involved and next to nothing about how NASA operatres.
The problem with continuing to use the shuttle is that there already exists a safe alternative, called the Soyuz. It's more fault tolerant of launch failures, more passively safe on reentry, and less likely to fail because it uses safer fuels. It's also much cheaper to launch and not subject to wear since they're only used once. The Soyuz has only failed twice in 860 flights, only one of which was manned. It only killed one crew member due to the design. We'd still need the shuttle for its lifting capacity, but we could retrofit it to fly on autopilot and have humans meet it up in space. US astronauts aren't dying in the name of science, they're dying for nationalism and government pork.
Ummm buddy
Enterprise was never meant for space and never flew in space, in fact it was not even a full size mock-up. It was built purely for for testing concepts and air-worthyness.
You've forgotten about the shuttle Atlantis.
But, most importantly, you're forgetting that the extremely reliable Soyuz space capsules of our Russian friends are available, ready, and waiting. To help fund the Russian space agency, and in order to have something reliable themselves, your own government recently purchased the rights to fly a few Soyuz capsules.
The lifeboat is ready.
George Bush + Linux = "I will not let information get in the way of the fight against Windows"
the shuttle is still going because certain surveillance sats only fit in the big shuttle bay. Indeed, Mike Mullane in his excellent book hints at some black ops. The shuttle may be in the "white world", but a lot of those flights move "black" payloads. That's not a bad thing-but the fact is that this tail wags the shuttle dog, and while it needs updating badly, we are locked into sat replacement on a steady basis-and some of those freight car sized devices can't ride anything else-not that we'd let them.
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with?
If I remember right, weren't the external fuel tanks on the early shuttle flights painted - over the foam insulation? I seem to recall some dicussion on the news after Columbia about the paint helping keep the foam from breaking off.
The paint added weight and (of corse) cost, especially considering the fuel tank was only used once. So they dropped it later on.
It seems pretty obvious to me that a nice tight 1/2 overlap wrap of Pallet wrap would prevent shredding of the insulating foam.
There are some surprisingly hi-tech pallet wraps available now, resistant to UV and all sorts of other degradation.
I have written twice to NASA about this, but have received no 'thanks for saving our space-faring asses' letter in return.
Perhaps with the power of slashdot, this idea will somehow percolate to NASA. Besides, it would be a lot cheaper than a giant condom.
- Goldfrapp fan
I think its not a bad idea to launch management couple of times before launching the astronauts. This way, we will not lose the valuable astronaut brains and skills.
And as far as I can tell from the same type of searching I did on Enterprise and Endeavour, Atlantis should be ready to fly; it has already completed the upgrading that Endeavour is just finishing.
I left out the Soyuz option because I don't believe the U.S.' plan should rely solely on another country. Certainly they could be a 'Plan C', but who knows how much time/money Russia would need to deploy one?
I think the ISS has an emergency capsule, but I doubt it would hold seven to ten people! I would also wonder about the life support capabilities for any length of time, with so many unexpected visitors.
You guys bringing up Atlantis makes me wonder why it is not the one they planned for this mission, instead of Discovery, the one that experienced very similar problems to Columbia the last time it flew? Atlantis has flown 26 missions and Discovery has flown 31. Five missions could really be a lot of wear....
When you're dead, you don't know you're dead. It only affects the people around you. Same thing when you're stupid.
Abolish NASA, get the laws restricting space travel repealed. Let the same profit motive that explored the planet explore the other planets.
Yes, it is easier to say than do. Doing is what entrepreneurs do best. If moon rocks could be sold, there would be more moon exploration looking for interesting rocks than Congress could fund in 100 years!
And then there are asteroids, just floating there waiting for someone to go grab one...
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
The space shuttles have flown a combined total of 420 million miles (see here: http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/missions/sts9 2_longhaul_sidebar2.html, and I'm adding in a rough guesstimate of flights up until the most recent fatal disaster) and have suffered a total of 14 fatalities, for one fatality every 30 million miles. In 1994 alone, US cars travelled a combined total of 1.793 billion miles (somebody actually tracks this: your tax dollars at work http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/rtecs/chapter3.html ). If cars were as "safe" as the shuttle were, you would assume about 60 traffic accidents would happen per year.
However, this is really stacking the deck in the shuttle's favor. If you want to be technical about it, my bicycle hurtled hundreds of thousands of miles through space on my morning commute this morning... relative to the position of the sun. Granted, relative to the position of my house the displacement was only about two miles. Almost all of the mileage wracked up by the shuttle was it coasting around orbiting, when the only thing it had to accomplish was "don't spontaneously explode or have every life support system fail at once". If you want to compare times when the shuttle was actually under directed movement (and a realistic likelihood of danger), which would be essentially limited to lift-off and flying back to earth with some very minor positional adjustments once you're in orbit, the shuttle is many millions of times more dangerous than a car. Some back of the envelope math: the trip to orbit is about 200 miles, the trip down the same, and we'll be VERY generous and say the shuttle travels another 100 miles once its up there in positioning changes and whatnot. Thats a total of 500 miles per trip. There have also been 114 shuttle missions over the course of the space program. Thats one death per 4,000 miles. If cars were that much of a deathtrap we'd expect about 450,000 traffic fatalities in 1994. There were about 43,000 last year.
Bonus points: if you charge the deaths to alcohol instead of cars (hey, the cars would have been perfectly safe if the guy hadn't been driving drunk -- thats like charging a passenger airplane for fatalities if it gets hit with a missile), roughly half of the car fatalities vanish. Presumably the shuttle program does not have an alcohol problem.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Can you point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was worth a human life?
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. Or something of great utility like, I don't know, the automobile. The green revolution. The vaccine for polio. A cure for cancer. If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for)
7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Paragraph two: "many millions of time more dangerous than a car" was my off-top-of-my-head guestimate before I actually broke out paper and pencil and ran the numbers. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I can tell the difference between 10^1 and 10^6... most days. Maybe I should apply for work designing orbiters...
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I look at old systems such as B-52s still flying missions and question whether the problem is *inherent*. How about, nobody has been asked to come up with a better solution. Why not "peel the banana" and have a coating on the external tank that is *designed* to safely fall away? Or use something like Space ShipOne/White Knight that uses and an aerodynamic system for initial assent?
It may be cheaper in the long run to replace the shuttle but I haven't seen enough discussion of the alternatives to know that. I look at SpaceShipOne/White Knight and see that its possible to have a safe, economical, and reusable launch system.
I don't think that the shuttle has an inherent design flaw; it just suffers from being the first operational attempt at making a reusable launch system. Its probably possible to design a shuttle version 2.0 that looks a lot like the existing shuttle (keeps lots of development costs down) but that doesn't have the risks or costs of the current shuttle. Most of the other posts regarding the shuttle focus on risks but NASA hasn't met the original goals for shuttle trip costs or turn-around time and this probably has a lot more to do with efforts to replace the shuttle than flight risks.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
The space station and humans in space will always need water, so that should be the "fuel" they haul up with one of the shuttles, as much water as possible. Another shuttle should haul up as many advanced solar PV panels as they can deploy. Then they can have a lot more electrical power for actually doing some useful stuff, and also make more fuel (electrolysis),and burn hydrogen and oxygen in a small rocket to maintain orbit. An added bonus is more oxygen for the crew if it is needed. I don't know how practical that would be due to temperature variances tough, perhaps they need to maintain their water storage deep inside the station where it is protected more. The shuttles are allegedly pretty well insulated though (the famous foam), so inside them might be sufficient.
Do you happen to know offhand approximately how much fuel of what type they currently use to maintain ISS in that orbit?
US cars travelled a combined total of 1.793 billion miles
There were about 43,000 [car related deaths]last year.
That would make about one death every 40,000 miles, my car has about 170,000 miles on it. If those numbers are right I would be expected to have killed 4 people with my car in the 14 years I've owned it.
I heard that NASA will charge $100 per seat to watch the fireworks ???
Personally, I am glad to see some internal controls in access to foreign workers but I digress...
I doub't that your experience with this employee is a reflection of the crew involved with the space shuttle. My experience has been the opposite.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
There was also Pathfinder, which was used for ground tests, and Explorer, which is a museum replica.
This actually illustrates a side point. We're running out of actual, real shuttles. Enterprise doesn't really count as much since it was never intended to be launched. The sad fact is that the shuttle program is coming to the end of its lifespan. As things progress, we're not going to need the shuttles we have remaining. Atlantis will be cut up for parts to keep Endeavour and Discovery going, and then probably we'll end up cutting up Endeavour to keep Discovery in the air for those final few flights. Assuming, of course, that there isn't another catastrophic accident.
The sad thing about this is that it will mean there's a chance we won't have a real, complete shuttle that actually saw use in space to put into a museum. Regardless of the flaws in its design, the Shuttle is a symbolic piece of equipment. It seems like a huge shame that there's a chance that all we may end up with is the shell of Discovery or Endeavour, the remains of Atlantis and whichever of the other two active ones is used for parts, and the whatever they haven't torn off of Enterprise left to show our grandkids 50 years down the track. Discovery would be the ideal, as of the remaining shuttles it had most of the high profile missions, such as launching Hubble.
We may have replicas like Explorer for the museums, but a replica is simply not the same.
Well at least they scored for the first time since the Cup started.
And going back to topic...
I think it's about time to go, and hey, why don't they send a crew of slashdot trolls, that'll clean up the gene pool for sure.
Absolutely right: perfectionist, budget-buster, and committed to testing every part before putting them together.
I highly recommend the new von Braun biography, "Dr. Space".
One thing NASA has forgotten from his legacy is the need for absolute honesty in engineering. He rewarded people for coming forward and admitting screwups even when they might have been blamed for loss of a vehicle.
Honesty, safety margins, and a culture of "there's no such thing as 'sort of' working" give you machines that work and that don't kill people. Von Braun's team designed the Saturn first stage. It's entertaining to calculate the total energy that was stored in one of those, and divide it by c squared. 300 milligrams. All released in a few minutes. Von Braun's team made that work safely and successfully every single time.
I need to get my eye glasses prescription bumped up again. If you look at the page I linked to, it was a comma there (1,793 billion miles, not 1.793 billion miles), not a period. Which changes the calculation by three orders of magnitude. Doing some additional Googling I found that the NHTSA has broken down the numbers for us: there are roughly 1.51 deaths per *hundred million* miles travelled. This means that, by any definition of "miles travelled" the shuttle is less safe.
n n/TSF2001.pdf
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/pdf/nrd-30/NCSA/TSFA
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Your post should have been modded "Off Topic" but instead you have racked up the mod points today in this and other posts by bashing bureaucrats. Congratulations, I guess. I really don't get it, though, as nameless bureaucrats are easy prey. It's the Slashdot equivalent of hunting quailtards. Bash a nameless bureaucrat and win a prize.
I'm confused however by your defense of the leader of the pack of not-accountable bureaucrats.
I suppose you may be suffering cognitive dissonance and not even realize it. In any case you have employed a straw man logical fallacy in support of your position (misrepresenting the position of your debate opponent). Bush is not responsible for the Hurricane. His many public critics such as Paul Krugman (economist and New York Times columnist) have not claimed that preventing the hurricane from hitting New Orleans was his, to use a phrase popular with Bush, "job."
Krugman and other critics have said, however, that appointing someone with no relevant experience of any kind to head FEMA led directly to a dramatic reduction in the ability of the agency to respond to a crisis, measured against past performance. FEMA under the Clinton administration was one of the most highly regarded of federal agencies. FEMA under Bush is the butt of jokes: Federal Emergency My Ass, et. al.
Within the last week it was revealed by Congressional audit to have mismanaged the Katrina relief so badly that as much as $1.4 Billion (with a B) dollars have been wasted. Nearly as many people died as the result of Katrina as from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Most of those people drowned. They drowned because the apparatus of the federal government ignored warnings, failed to prepare, and then was unable to offer the timely assistance that the tax paying citizens of this country expect and paid for. How can you possibly bring up Katrina in defense of Bush? It's completely insane to do that.
Bush wants everyone to believe that he's a great manager, but the evidence is pretty clear -- he sucks. He was an utter failure in every business endeavor he ever participated in. In a matter of a few short years he turned the country around, and it's now on a beeline course headed into the ground, racking up debt that your grandchildren will be paying for their entire lives. Do you feel good about that? I don't. I don't even have kids and I don't want *your* kids saddled with this kinda pointless and stupid debt. Bush is the worst manager we have had running the country for such a long period of time that only historians are qualified to debate whether or not Bush is The Worst President Evar (TM).
Bush supports the space program during the occasional speech where he thinks he's going to pick up a few votes from the "hope for the future" space enthusiast and Star Trek set. You seem to be keenly interested in the space program. How can you not see through Bush's cynical ruse?
Wake up.
P.S. This is not a personal criticism, merely friendly advice: Learn to spell "bureaucrat", your criticisms will be more effective.
It does roll downhill in terms that those higher up will blame those lower, but when it comes to public opionion and visibility it's more likely those at the top (or at least high-up and in the public eye) will be the ones taking the bad publicity and opinion.
Well, there is a minor issue with using Soyuz--it only holds three people. So, at best, you're going to have six people on board and hope that any disaster doesn't block the docking area.
That said, I sort of agree. I remember NASA spending big bucks on a "space lifeboat." Frankly, for the amount they spent on it, they could have bought a bunch of Soyuz capsules instead andbuilt a couple of docking areas for redundancy.
Oh, come on. They can get the same company that makes the shuttle's windshield wipers to make them some nets, too.
For example, Aviation Week reported that the SRBs recovered from one of the first few flights had a near-complete burnthrough, at the nozzle I believe, which nearly caused loss of vehicle and crew. Tiles fell off routinely, a problem which has actually gotten better over time as processes have improved. We didn't hear much, because it was considered too boring or technical to be newsworthy.
The Challenger explosion was like the Apollo 1 fire, in that it prompted everyone to turn over rocks and see what was underneath. After Challenger, all the safety-related incidents suddenly became newsworthy.
burn burn burn
I agree, we have a surplus of cheap, disposable, and easily replaceable humanity. But unless we just need to update the dogs- and monkeys-in-orbit survival data, we need people smart enough to actually *do* something useful while they are up there. And as all /. readers are painfully aware, clueful thinkers are in alarmingly short supply.
Or were you suggesting that the smart people stay on the ground and develop assembly-line mentality tasks for those we send up -- which sounds suspiciously like outsourcing our astronauts.
From what I've seen;
you get the top guys saying that "it was the manager/s below me who were responsible for oversight on that matter"
and the bottom guys going "it was the manager/s above me who were responsible for that matter"
The guy/s in the middle who now have two votes to one don't stand a chance at who gets the blame...
Don't be caught in the middle (-managment)...
Looks like a good time to stop using commas (or anything else) to denote 000.
Looks about par for the course.
Half the people are cursing NASA for flying the shuttle too soon.
Half the people are cursing NASA for taking so long to fly the shuttle.
The only concenses is that nobody likes NASA, and anybody and everybody could do it better, including Homer Simpson.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
During mankind's past history, this same stuff was called "colonizing the americas" and "colonizing australia".
Maybe, they'll be still alive.
With luck, they'll be happy to stay there, escaping from the police-state that would have developped by then accross the occident on Earth. (and becoming the *new* land of the free).
With more luck, after a couple of centuries, they'll manage to become the new cultural and economic super-power.
And then, most probably, several decades later, they'll start to protect their corporation, abuse their new patent system, waive personnal freedoms in the name of planetary security, be constantly affraid of imaginary "pedo-terrorist-pirate" that reportedly posses anti-matter weapons, declare wars against anyone standing in the way, etc...
Only this time, the catapult-over-the-mexican-border will be a little bit more complicated to do.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
How many bad SciFi movies have started with something along these lines? An incredible invention that has the possibility of killing someone or someones (but that would *never* happen!), a gung-ho project director who just won't listen warnings from the aforementioned "crazy" scientist, and 7 other scientists/pilots/citizens who are willing to put it all on the line in the name of science. C'mon people, we know how this is going to end!
Wouldn't that be great if the ISS had a broken down shuttle parked next to it. It would be just like a Redneck's home! The only difference is that they don't have to mow....wait...The Rednecks don't mow anyway.
Attention Sensitivity Police: I can say it because I'm a Redneck...but then, talking trash about Rednecks doesn't bother the PC crowd.
--"those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. "
Not sure what you're talking about. The shuttle main engines have been one of the biggest headaches of the program. While they haven't caused any crashes yet, the things do not do what they were originally designed to do. NASA still has to tear them apart and overhaul them every mission since they can't predict what kind of failures they're going to see. As a multi-launch-capable long-term solution, these fail miserably.
It's apparant, to me, there's NO way to make the Shuttle 100 percent safe....there's no way to make ANY spacecraft 100 percent safe. Space is a hostile environment. The astronauts know this. One thing that cannot be disputed is that the shuttle has flown before with foam ramps falling off the shuttle. What happened to Columbia was very unfortunate, but in my book, it's a freak accident. There are so many variables that had to happen JUST RIGHT in order for the vehicle to be lost. All that can be done is try to minimize it. It can't be prevented. What happens if a Heron or some other big bird is in the way when the shuttle launches? Odds are, a BIRD can bring the shuttle down just as easy as a piece of foam. The odds are very low that this will happen but NOT zero. Does that mean we don't launch?? No.
What I do see happening is a return to the traditional capsule like format. It could even be done in a reusable format MUCH easier and less prone to problems then the shuttle. We have to keep in mind....space is different. We can't send airplanes into space. We have to send spacecraft into space.
Gorkman
Didn't Challenger blow up because it was launched despite objections?
The only opinions that should matter regarding launching are the engineers and safety experts. Anyone else, politician, management, media etc should go to hell.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
>point to a single result coming from the shuttle program that was
>worth a human life?
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few. Sacrifice if part of exploration. Mountain climers willing sacrifice their lives and body parts just to climb that mountain. What good result comes from that?
Just use google to find successful shuttle experiments. As is typical in science, most experiments are failures. Very few result in something as dramatic as directly saving human lives. However, the failures also teach us what doesn't work. So in the long run we gain either way.
Could some of the projects be automated? Probably. But a human brain can think its way out of a jam better than any machine we hope to produce in the near future. Humans are creative, and can excel where machines fail.
To sum up, lots of people are willing to risk life and limb to explore...it's part of being human. Advances in knowledge usually come in small jumps...and who knows what seemingly trivial experiment might result in an earth-shattering technology?
Human safety is important. Part of space exploration is to make space safer for everyone. That alone can justify a space program.
6.5 Trillion? Either I was asleep while *everyone* was breeding, or you're off by three orders of magnitude. I'm not trying to be a Population Nazi, but having 6.5 trillion meat-popsicles on this rock would be pretty disturbing.
Moment of idiocy...
Trillion->Billion
I don't read AC A human right
When I joined the workforce it was with Uncle Sam: the federal government. That's the same outfit, for those of you who might be unaware, that runs NASA. The federal government is a large and interesting organization that has a rule book for everything and everything is done by the book. Or Else. As it was explained to me, the government doesn't like having to explain replacement of expensive things because of stupid mistakes. They make enough stupid mistakes as it is. They also find it difficult to deal with angry families or foreign nations when these accidents impact those entities.
My early work experience was very similar to the business of space travel. I worked on high performance fighter aircraft. You had to focus very hard on safety and doing your job right because the danger level was already higher than most people see in their lives. On top of that, I was an armament systems specialist which means that I worked with things intended to blow up or otherwise kill people. Usually these devices were intended to kill large quantities of people or destroy very large and heavily armored vehicles or buildings. Safety was therefore extremely important because you didn't want one of these things going boom at the wrong time or place. Our goal was in fact to have the pilots fly around with these things and bring them back to us in one piece not having killed or destroyed anything. If/when we pulled that off it was A Good Thing(TM) . We were told, and I have witnessed, that if we took the time to do our jobs safely we would be doing them faster and at less cost than if we threw caution to the wind. Yes, I said that I have witnessed it.
Safety was preached to us all day, every day. We began each day with a mission briefing, a prayer and a safety briefing. On the flightline we started every load with a safety briefing. At the end of the day we debriefed so that we might learn from the experience and be more safe tomorrow. If, at any step of the operation, anyone thought conditions were unsafe, they would speak up and everything stopped until the situation was corrected. It didn't matter if the person crying safety was a general or the newest airman fresh out of tech school and wet behind the ears. The fact that I ended my enlistment with all of my limbs is a testament to this culture of safety. When you consider the dangers involved....it's pretty darn mindblowing.
If you compare tactical fighter operation with shuttle operation, the danger levels are very similar. Why then do we have NASA willing to launch a shuttle despite their top people saying it is unsafe to do so? When the engineers are saying "STOP", why is the mission allowed to proceed?
This is not the first time that NASA has had a disregard for safety. In fact it's something of a way of life for them. Remember the Apollo 1 disaster and the hatch that couldn't be opened by the astronauts? And that's not the first such stupid unsafe act they were involved in. NASA and the CIA have always had this acceptable risk culture as part of their flight operations.
The military has a culture of safety and, although their jobs are extremely dangerous, they do not believe in acceptable risk. The military is always working to make their jobs safer. NASA, on the other hand, has a culture of acceptable risk. They seem to figure that their jobs are dangerous and that's just the way it is. I'm thinking NASA could learn quite a bit from DoD. Yes, I actually typed that.
If we're ever going to get off this rock, space travel has to become safe. If we're ever going to use space to our advantage it has to become affordable, and that means we can't be accepting high risk all the time. Therefore this culture of acceptable risk is holding back our space program.
The Russians don't have the safest space program around but they sure have a cheaper space program that is just as active. The Soviets, when they ran the show, had a hell of a lot of stupid accidents. Then again, they have never spent the kind of
. Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
-- Ernest Shackleton, 1900
The key to all of the arguments regarding the flight of the Shuttle is sustainability. A good analogy is the Precision Daylight Bombing campaign the US waged in World War II. The British tried to do precision daylight bombing, but had to revert to nighttime area bombing because their losses showed the effort would not be sustainable. There were many reasons, but chief among them were that the British didn't have the Norden bombsite initially, and that at the time they tried to make Precision Daylight Bombing work, the German Luftwaffe was a far more formidable foe.
The US came into the picture in 1942, and wanted to validate Precision Daylight Bombing. They had a precision bomb sight that allowed them to pinpoint where the bombs would land in a highly technical and accurate way. This made the effort worth trying. Even so, the losses sustained after each mission were, initially, unsustainable. Several tactics had to be developed to give the bombers better protection, including the delivery of fighter aircraft that could escort the bombers directly to their targets. These changes lowered the losses to a point where the losses were sustainable, and much of Germany became of smoking hole as a result.
The Shuttle is similar, but in microcosm... We started with 5 shuttles, and now have only 3 after losing 2 of them to spectacular failures. The questions that need to be answered after these initial losses are whether or not the fleet has a sustainability problem. If a shuttle is likely to explode or fail in some other way ever 25 missions, then the question of sustainability is answered. We will blow them all up eventually, and that will be the end of the program.
The problem to solve is whether or not conditions have changed to a point where 3 shuttles can fly sustainably where before we had 5. Given that the shuttle is now a dead end project, and we are only looking to fly it for far less than would be implied by the 25 missions per shuttle failure, it would seem that sustainability is guaranteed.
However, it will not work that way. If another shuttle fails spectacularly, it will end the program immediately. This is because the sustainability question would then be answered in that you don't get a solid 25 missions out of them, you get 5. And with only two remaining, you can't guarantee a significant liklihood of success with any given mission.
If, on the other hand, the shuttle can be redesigned so that the will only fail every 100 missions or so, then the program can come to a normal termination. That's why the engineers are so balky about this at this point in time. Another shuttle failure, and there is no retirement. Just a nasty job search for a steely eyed rocket man in his middle 50's looking to keep from starving...
What about exploration into the great unknown? Is that not important? 200 years ago, there was this thing called the Wild Frontier. Unsettled, unclaimed, and dangerous as hell. Oregon trail and Dysentery?
My point is that exploration is vital to the survival and expansion of the human race. What would the world be like if Jefferson hadn't gone through with the Louisiana Purchase? And yes, while space travel is *very* young in its development relative to (first world) human life on earth, that's OK, because sooner or later, we MUST go into space to survive.
http://www.asti-usa.com
Its just like if you go to the doctor and tell him to do a full physical on you, MRI, blood test, the works. Its almost a guarantee they will find something wrong, even if you have had it for years. The NASA engineers just never looked for falling foam.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
Look we have had 120 flights, next one is STS-121. Challenger problem has been fixed so it doesn't count. So based on past performance one can say odds are about 1 in 100 something fatal may happen. I believe we only have about 20 more shuttle launches planned so odds are quite good nothing awful will happen. Maintaining the infrastructure is quite expensive so it's time to get on with it. We have three shuttles so there should be no problem finishing the station which is the only reason for maintaining the shuttle. I don't want to get into discussing the station as I start foaming at the mouth about what a waste of resources. Of course using a shuttle mission for something valuable to humankind, like prolonging the life of the space telescope is out of the question. I think NASA's motto has become "To unboldly not to go".
from the damn-the-torpedoes-full-speed-agead dept
.... tonyking.tk
Man! The beaurocracy at NASA is damnable!
They even invent names for some of their more obscure departments!
Let's hope they insulate them with some of that excess foam before the shuttle takes off...
- Tony
.
- aqk
F U
The thing that destroyed Columbia happened during the powered phase.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before.
I agree. What critical science has the ISS done that couldn't have been done with cheaper unmanned launches, for considerably less than $100 billion? Has it done *anything* worth $100 billion? So far as I can tell the answer is a resoundingly bloody "no!".
I say kill the project, and the shuttle along with it. I'm not interested in maintaining a manned space program with my tax dollars simply because a few geeks with far too much testosterone floating around in their bloodstreams want to measure dick sizes. Or perhaps because they think they're 'entitled' to a shot at being an astronaut on my dime.
When there's an actual NEED to send manned craft into space then we'll talk, assuming private industry hasn't already taken the lead. Until then I'll lobby my congress critters to shut down the manned program and instead put that money into unmanned probes and experiments.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
So you're suggesting the space shuttle is about 10 times as dangerous per mile as a car, 20 times if you factor out alcohol.
Considering the fact that it starts out as a couple million pounds of explosives, operates in an environment hostile to both man and machine, and survives high accelerations, ridiculously high temperatures, and debris and micrometeors traveling over 10 times as fast as a bullet, that sounds awesome. When cars become able to do that and deliver 50,000 pounds of cargo to orbit, and support science, and dock with a space station, and recover cargo from orbit (something no other spacecraft can currently do) then miles per death will have meaning when comparing cars to space shuttles.
There is no longer any real doubt that the side-by-side stack and the overall complexity of the STS architecture add unnecessary risks compared to other designs. Some sort of ejection system like a launch escape motor is now considered a must-have. Combining crew and cargo on a single launch is also rather frowned upon. These were lessons driven home at a high cost, but that doesn't change the fact that the space shuttle has flown more than any other manned spacecraft, including Soyuz, which has also suffered loss of crew on two missions, had a couple more close calls, and represents multiple generations of design.
If the TOP BR*ASSES had any common sense, they would launch on the 4th of July.
This way they could possibly KILL (no pun intended) two birds with one stone.
If all goes well, what day would be more perfect than Independence Day? Independence from gravity. If it does not go well, what a firecracker it would be.
that Nixon gutted the program by not funding it enough in the early phases. That is the time to spend a little. That is a big part of why the shuttle was the nightmare that it is. Now, with the CEV, Congress and GWB are trying again to underfund it. I am hopeful that Griffin will actually force congress to fully fund it by the games that he is playing (cutting all else except for ISS, the shuttle, and the new rocket, means that congress will have to fund the others).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Columbia wasn't actually destroyed until it was coasting in for a landing, unpowered drive-wise.
But if you want to look at it that way, then the thing that destroyed Challenger (frozen O-rings) happened while it was sitting on the launch pad during an unpowered phase, so it evens out.
Back in the early part of the design, the foam was supposed to have a coating of white paint. Then the engineers figured out how much it would weigh (which would come RIGHT out of payload capacity) and decided to leave the foam unpainted.
I wonder if leaving off the paint made the foam more susceptable to environmental problems - like water getting into the texture and freezing - or if the paint would have provided enough added tensile strength to the surface to avoid the fracturing and detachment.
And if so, perhaps a suitable stabilizing/strengthing paint could be found or designed that would provide enough inuslating quality to replace an equivalent weight of foam, or encourage a compensating amount of condensation or rainwater/dew to slide off during flight, that the weight penalty could be avoided.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Actually, Apollo (the CSM) had problems and faults of varying significance on nearly every flight - and it didn't fly nearly enough to state with confidence just how safe and reliable it would be over the long term. (Hell, the Soyuz (90 odd flights) and the Shuttle (117 flights) haven't even flown enough to be confident of their safety and reliability rates.)
The global population went up by 3 orders of magnitude recently? No wonder it's so crowded lately. Sheesh
Who gives a rat's nad about that cheap ass piece of crap soyuz!
Honastly shut up about that flying garbage heap.
Let's hear about some real and usefull alternatives to the shuttle not crap like
this that doesn't deserve mention to begin with and should have been tossed in
the garbage long ago.
Utter trash and crap that's all soyuz was is and will ever be.
Mercury 2 - hatch blows off prior to rescue ship reaching capsule. Sinks to the bottom of the ocean with astronaut Grissom still aboard
Gemini 6 - Engines cut off 6 seconds into launch. (you're sitting upon fuel that if it were to explode would equal that of a small atom bomb without the radiation)
Gemini 8 - Upon docking with the Agena target vehicle, Gemini capsule spins uncontrollably, Astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott almost black out and die. (The first astronaut to land on the moon was almost the first to die in space)
Apollo 1 - Fire in the cockpit during a routine test, all 3 astronauts killed.
Apollo 12 - Rocket hit by lightning twice during launch.
Apollo 13 - Oxygen tank explodes halfway to moon crippling the spacecraft. (you know the rest)
Challenger - Explodes 73 seconds into launch, all 7 astronauts killed
Columbia - Breaks up during reentry, all 7 astronauts killed
Russia's first capsule (I forget the name) - explodes on launchpad instead of launching, astronauts and engineers killed
Soyuz - parachutes failed and capsule slams into the ground
I write this to show that despite the popular belief that the shuttle is the only craft that has problems, it is/was not. And the astronauts as I said earlier know this and I think NASA does their best to minimalize risks. If this wasn't the case, you would have seen another shuttle on the launchpad shortly after the Challenger failure and after the Columbia tragedy. But NASA worked on things to try to cut down on foam loss. They thought they had it last July but were proven wrong when a big chunk still fell off. So again, they grounded the fleet instead of ignoring it and launching again. In all actuality, eliminating all foam loss is probably not possible. What they're doing is making sure that any foam lost is small enough that it won't do any damage. Either way, the astronauts no FULL well, what they're getting into when they climb into the orbiter.
What's the matter, James? No glib remark? No pithy comeback?
That's easy: Capitalism and the Free Market.
That's who gets blamed for every government bureaucratic boondoggle.
Slashdot is hardly the place to call for abolishing NASA and repealing all the laws against individual exploitation of space. Too many government run public school "graduates" who have accepted the "government is good" Big Lie hook, line and sinker. Or rather, "lock, stock, and barrel."
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics