Slashdot Mirror
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.
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!"
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!!!!
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.
While I suspect that SpaceX may have small payload rockets, it will probably be quite sometime before they have something as big as the cargo part of constellation.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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.
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.
"The ISS project is dying on it's backside without the shuttle"
What exactly is it the ISS is doing that makes it worth keeping alive, especially when its diverting billions of dollars from all those new things you list, so they mostly aren't happening?
Whenever people start lobbying in favor of the ISS I generally ask what has the ISS done that justifies the price tag, the zero G physiology research simply doesn't. The Russians did far more for far less on Mir, and still today the gist of it seems to be intensive exercise helps fight the effects of zero G. Not sure that really justifies a $100 billion price tag. I'm sure you can dig up some esoteric research done on the ISS but I assure you, you could could have gotten far better research spending the $100 billion elsewhere.
Someone also always says its crucial practice for taking the next step. With this I guess I can agree, it has been an invaluable lesson in how not to run a large space project.
@de_machina
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.
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.
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.
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.
But there would have been, if shuttle launches were actually as cheap as they were supposed to be!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
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
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.