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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."
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!!!!
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.
"It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe"
This particular team is an institutionalized bureaucracy. Their pay is the same whether they fly or not. Not flying is substantially easier and safer. They are mostly just trying to preserve their jobs until CRV or some other program comes along to which they can all be transfered and which point CRV will become extraordinarily expensive jobs program with a poor track record.
There is actually somewhat greater job security in flying infrequently, and stretching out how long it takes to finish the ISS, because when they finish the 16 flights or whatever their careers are over unless their is a big new project to transfer to, i.e. CRV and the return to the Moon. They just have to be careful that they don't frustrate the politicians that pay them to the point they pull the plug on them prematurely. Not flying in the name of safety is the safest methodology.
The Shuttle payroll stays the same, yet their flight rate has reached a truly glacial pace since Columbia. I sure would be curious to see what the actual cost per flight has been for the last flight and this one. I'm guessing probably in the $5-10 billion range per flight, and these two missions have accomplished nothing beyond hauling supplies to the ISS which should have been done with a cheap, expendable booster. Though when we spend $8 billion a month on Iraq to no obvious good end, I guess $5 billion isn't so bad. But still, we spend so little money on space and technology(outside weapons) you are left wishing the dollars we do spend were spent more wisely than to just keep jobs going in Texas and Florida for political reasons. I assure you whenever NASA's budget comes up the jobs program it drives is way more important to the politicians that fund them than are what they actually accomplish which is why the manned program has a huge payroll and accomplished very little. NASA kind of needs to be like a corporation, where either you succeed or you go under. The way it is now they can fail and just keep failing.
The basic problem with our space program is their is no objective, there is no goal, there is nothing to reach where there will be celebration and a sense of accomplishment. At this point the objective is just to kind of keep the shuttle from another catastrophic failure and kind of half finish the ISS. At that point there is a 50/50 chance success will be declared and then they will have to figure out how to abandon the ISS safely since it sucks money out of more worthwhile endeavors, and does next to nothing useful.
At this point getting getting a life boat colony on Mars, mining asteroids, or finding a new energy source are the only objectives that really excite enough to justify manned presence.
Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier.
At the rate our exploding population is exhausting both mineral and energy resources on our home planet, starting to explore space alternatives would be worth doing though it will be a long time before they will be viable. When we start running out of minerals having asteroid mining proved will be priceless.
@de_machina
IMO: when it comes to "accelerating the program" I don't think it matters so much what experiments they're doing so much as how they're getting them up there.
The U.S. manned space program went from 'nothing' to 'shuttle' in about 21 years (1960-1981), 'nothing' to 'moon' in about 8 years, did 'moon' for three-plus years, did 'Skylab' for only SIX MONTHS, has been running at 'shuttle' for the last 25 years, was stuck at 'o-rings' for two-plus years, and has been stuck at 'foam' for the last three years.
Where has 'acceleration' been 'lately'?
"It's time to take life by the cans." ~ Bender ("Bendin' in the Wind", ep. 3-13)
If this group was in charge of the appolo missions we'd still be doing near earth orbital testing.
I take it you are unaware that Von Braun was under constant pressure for being too slow, too much a perfectionist and too insistant that everything be as close to just right as we could make it before he would agree to light the fuse?
In fact he drove the "let's just plug ahead and get this baby done" folks nuts with his attitude that we should "just plug ahead and get this baby done right".
Understand that at that point in time he had seen, and even been personally responsible for, more launch failures than any man alive
KFG
we really need to start working on a next generation system right now
We are, and quoth that article: "The winning concept will be chosen in 2008, and the manned vehicle flown in 2014."
But, in the meantime, the Shuttle is all we got, and we should use it, rather than waiting until 2014 to go back up into space.
What if Lewis and Clark waited for the railroad to be built before heading West because canoes and horses were too risky?
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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!
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.
...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.
Hang on, let me get this right.... You **don't** want people to risk their lives for science and exploration?
WTH? That's EXACTLY what I want people to do. People are CHEAP - we have lots and lots of 'em. More than enough to spare sending a few out into space, without having to worry about them.
Personally, I'm in the camp which says "Send men to Mars, but don't give them a way to return." Just keep sending more men, and more equipment, with absolutely no thought to how to get them back. Who cares how to get 'em back? Earth has enough humans! This would make space travel to Mars quite affordable, and possible within just a few years.
Hell, you'd have so many people apply it'd be scary.
In this stupidly politically correct USA-centric world, we have forgotten that exploration IS risky, that science needs volunteers sometimes, and that sometimes those volunteers get hurt, or die. BIG DEAL. Just accept the fact that space is a big bad place, that people will die, and that expensive hardware can go East. This is the way exploration has ALWAYS been. It seems now, however, that people are more concerned about appearances than substance.
It seems like no politician has the guts to stand up and say "Yeah - we're goign to send men to Mars - and we'll worry about how to get them back in 10 years or so. If they're still alive when we are able to retrieve them, that will be a huge scientific triumph for us."
How many escape pods are there? "NONE,SIR!" You counted them? "TWICE, SIR!"
Hell, you'd have so many people apply it'd be scary.
., basically asking 'Would you volunteer to be part of an expedition to mars even if it's guarenteed that you won't come back, and it's very likely that you'll be dead within 5 years?'. Given that there are ~300 million americans, let alone 6.5 trillion humans on earth, we'd have no real problems finding volunteers, even highly qualified ones if the volunteer rate is even in the fractions of a percent. Heck, if one in a million volunteer, that's 300 volunteers.
Yes, it's indeed somewhat scary. I remember them doing a survey for this
I don't read AC A human right
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.
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.