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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."
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.
You got it wrong. It's:
1. cut funding
2. ignore the engineers and launch anyhow
3. blame the engineers when something goes wrong
4. State the problem is not what even high-school dropouts suspect is the problem
5. Ignore the engineers for weeks until it becomes patently obvious to even idiots that the problem engineers warned about and laypersons expected was the problem IS the problem
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
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.
You forgot... 6. Have Congress rape NASA's budget further by requiring earmarks for their favorite local pet projects having any kind of a "space" theme.
I reserve the right to think for myself. Others' opinions are optional. Puppy on lap = typos...not illiteracy.
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.
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.
7. Employ a keen sense of irony by killing any R&D programs that might lead to affordable, reliable, and frequent access to space before they produce results, using the excuse that the research and development programs have run over-budget. Ignore the fact that the greatest budget over-runs occur in the operational Space Shuttle program. Hope nobody notices that a viable alternative might threaten continued funding of the Shuttle program. See X-33, DC-X, et. al.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
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.
Are engineers on the line for effectiveness, or just safety? If safety is the only consideration, the obvious course of action is never to fly.
I would not believe the prediction that the project constellation has a failure rate of 1 in 2000. NASA made all sorts of claims about the shuttle that it did not come close to meeting. Everyone wants a safe and cheap rocket, but it is not realistic. Manned or unmanned, rockets are unsafe. For what NASA does, NASA has a fairly good safety record. We need to change our expectations and realize how daring astronauts are.
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
I suppose the answer is to let rocket scientists design the next one and not a committee of politicians. The committee should be there to say - "it should get this high, carry this much, we want it in ten years plus whatever, and we don't want it to cost more than this amount if you can help it" then go away. None of this garbage micromanagement of insisting that different parts get built in different areas for the purpose of generating votes which resulted in a design change that killed people - the proirity should not be votes for the party that dominates to committee but building a working vehicle.
Originally they didn't plan to strap it to the side of a whopping great rocket and shoot it into space, either. Originally they had planned to have a very large, reusable delta-winged aircraft which the shuttle would clip into (this is one of the reasons why it fits so cleanly onto a 747). The booster aircraft would take the shuttle up to a very high altitude, the shuttle would take off into orbit, and the booster would return back to the ground where it could be re-used. They didn't build it, convinced it would cost too much to put the desired payloads into orbit. In retrospect they probably would have been better with the original idea. Certainly it would have been better then the horrible kludge they came up with.
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 ]
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