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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."
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.
In other news, old junk goes "boom".
There is no compelling need to put people in space with primitive technology now that the Cold War is over. Life is cheap, courage abundant, but life support equipment is insanely expensive. Send robots first, gather data, and save sending humans for later. It is not rational to rush. Let technology evolve, send more unmanned systems to explore, then send more mature designs to follow.
Oh, by the way, put the jettisonable explosive bits BELOW the fuselage next time.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Earth Worshippers Cause Death in Space: Environmental Dogma Has Led to the Sacrifice of Fourteen Astronauts on the Space Shuttle
by Hannes Hacker (July 11, 2003)
Now that a dramatic new test has confirmed that a piece of thermal insulation flaking off of space shuttle Columbia's external tank during launch was the most likely cause of its destruction during reentry, the typical second-guessing in the press has focused on NASA engineers, asking: "What did Mission Control know, and when did they know it?"
Somehow, NASA engineers should have guessed about the damage done to Columbia's thermal tiles and pulled an Apollo 13-style rabbit out of their hat. The implication is that they should have been omniscient and omnipotent.
Having heroes like NASA's mission controllers around to quietly brave the world's criticism certainly serves to divert attention from those who have done the most to contribute to this disaster--and who regard themselves as omniscient and omnipotent enough to command the entire American economy and the lives of its citizens: the environmentalists.
Why did the shuttle's foam insulation flake off? In response to an edict from the EPA, NASA was required to change the design of the thermal insulating foam on the shuttle's external tank. They stopped using Freon, or CFC-11, in order to comply with the 1987 Montreal Protocol, an agreement designed to head off doubtful prognostications of an environmental disaster.
But it was the elimination of the old foam that led to a real disaster for the shuttle program. The maiden flight with the new foam, in 1997, resulted in a ten-fold increase to foam-induced tile damage. The new foam was far more dangerous than the old foam. But NASA--a government organization afraid of antagonizing powerful political interests--did not reject the EPA's demands and thoroughly reverse their fatal decision. Instead, they sought a compromise, applying for a waiver from the EPA that allowed them to use the old foam on some parts of the external tank.
NASA notes that it is impossible to ascertain with certainty whether it was the old or the new foam that caused the recent disaster, and environmentalists will no doubt say this means that we can't pin the disaster on them. But any unnecessary increase in risk in an enterprise so unforgiving of error, is unacceptable. The bottom line is that NASA took a much greater risk in order to comply with EPA demands. Environmentalist junk science trumped sound engineering.
This is not the first time that has happened. The cause of the 1986 Challenger explosion is officially established as hot gases burning through an O-ring joint in one of the solid-rocket boosters. NASA was roundly criticized for its decision to launch in cold weather over the objection of some engineers, but there was a deeper cause that was not as widely reported.
In 1985 NASA had switched to a new putty to seal the O-ring joints. The new putty became brittle at cold temperatures, thus allowing Dr. Richard Feynman to teach NASA a famous lesson. At the congressional hearing investigating the accident, he simply placed some of the O-ring putty in a glass of ice water and crumbled it in his fingers.
NASA had changed the sealant because its original supplier for O-ring putty stopped producing it for fear of anti-asbestos lawsuits.
Had NASA not run out of the original putty, the Challenger disaster would not have happened. Indeed, when the Air Force ran out of the same putty and replaced it with the same brittle substitute, their Titan 34D heavy-lift boosters suffered two sudden launch failures, after a string of successes that had lasted as long as that of the space shuttle.
These accidents are not primarily the fault of careless engineers, nor are they merely the unintended consequences of bureaucrats blindly following federal rules and slashdot dogma. They are the result of a philosophy that hold human needs--such as the need for a safe shuttle launch or re-entry--as less important than a concern to prese
I heard that NASA will charge $100 per seat to watch the fireworks ???