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Space Shuttle Gains Remote-Control Landing Capability
rufey writes "An article over at Space.com mentions two new tools that Space Shuttle Discovery will have aboard during its upcoming flight, designated STS-121, scheduled to lift off on July 1, 2006. One tool is for tile repair. The other tool is a 28-foot-long cable that would be used to connect an avionics bay located on the mid-deck with the flight-deck controls. The cable enables flight controllers on the ground to land the Shuttle completely by remote control, including the ability to lower the landing gear. The remote control landing would be used in the case where the Shuttle was damaged to the point that it would be too risky to land it with humans aboard, but could be landed without humans aboard in an attempt to save the vehicle. The astronauts would take refuge on the ISS while mission control in Houston attempt to land a damaged Shuttle."
IIRC, The soviet space shuttle Buran (Snowstorm) had remote landing capabilities from the start of the project http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuttle_Buran
So far, the ISS has always only be filled up to the number of people that can be immediately evacuated with the always-attached escape vehicle. Now, we're filling it up more? I understand this is an emergency, but imagine the ISS gets hit by space junk and 3 people can go back to earth while the other have to wave goodbye on the ISS and die?
Additionally, I think the Space Shuttle needs to load a connector to dock to the ISS - will this now be always loaded into the cargo bay or what?
A 28 ft long cable to "remote-control" the shuttle ? they are not gonna go far this time, are they ? ;)
-S
including the ability to lower the landing gear
Yes, I suppose that's sort of a "must have" feature when landing a big glider-like object.
"You superiour intellect is no match for our puny weapons" - The Simpsons
The controls seem fairly intuitive, but I wonder if the budget is ready for it's upkeep and operational costs.
"Common sense will be the death of us all"
The Shuttle Orbiter already has automatic landing capabilities. Although the system has never been used all the way to touchdown, the Orbiter does make most of its trip back to the ground on autopilot until the commander takes over of the controls as it nears landing.
The last I heard the landing gear release was a simple manual switch with no connection to the flight control system. TFA describes the new cable as a "Data Cable" so there must also be a new connection between a computer system and the landing gear switch.
Its strange that this was not mentioned in the article. Perhaps this change was made earlier?
Oh and BTW I am still reading the apollo 17 ALSJ and much is made of the exploding foam incidents on apollo 16 and 17. The stuff was literally rocketing up into the sky around the LM during both missions. You would think that somebody would think (foam == bad) as a part of the lessons learnt from apollo. Drilling holes in the stuff is clearly not enough.
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the shuttle lands you !
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i gotta agree with Dextro there.
" ... including the ability to lower the landing gear".
You know you're landing gear up when it takes full throttle to taxi.
Does no-one remember seeing the prototype for this being demonstrated in Airplane II (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083530/)?
"Well at least we got the vehicle back! Let's get some beer!"
Using the ISS to hold the crew while waiting for a couple of soyouz was already in the plan for a long time.
Since the shuttle has not many more flights to execute anyway, why risk valuable ground facilities (plus, of course, people) by risking to crash an already seriously damaged shuttle on them?
Ah, everything old is new again
Orationem pulchram non habens, scribo ista linea in lingua Latina
But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required. Flying the landing just right by hand was not feasible, so they settled on flipping the landing gear switch as a paltry validation of the need of humans on the shuttle.
They also asked to control the brakes, and this was tried a few times, but the humans couldnt use the brakes efficiently enough, leading to some near brake failures, so braking was returned to computer control.
Apparently the engineeers ripped out ALL automatic control of the landing-gear, so now they have to run new wires from the computers to the landing gear switch!
Ohhhhhh, what a kloooooodge!
It only took what, 20 years?
... oh ... wait ... nevermind ...
I'm sure next they'll announce a new re-useable capsule ala soyuz, going back to the cheap&reliable method.
The soviets have also used automated docking for a long time, something the US has still to implement afaik. The regulary launched russian progress cargo ships use this when they dock to ISS. If you havent seen it in action I recommend searching for it on youtube or google video, it looks cool :)
I hope that wifi link isn't going to use WEP. :P
Registered Linux user #421033
As far as I can remember, the foam on the tank is insulation to keep the contents cold while the shuttle is on the landing pad.
It isn't actually needed during flight.
The problem is that during launch, large chunks of it can fall off and dent the orbiter itself.
In which case, why don't they cut the foam into small cubes when they stick it on to the tank ?
It could rain small cubes of foam during launch and not harm the orbiter.
Ok, sticking individual cubes on would be more tedious that spraying it on, but it might be possible to create a mold that shaped the foam to add break points in it so that it would split into small chunks rather than big chunks.
Ok, I know, they have probably already thought of this and found good reasons why not. ...
Just an idea
The best by what criterion? By costing a helluva lot more to do the same job, just to resemble travelling in a mac truck instead of a car? Just as a national penis size symbol along the lines of "we can afford to haul a giant truck into orbit, even at the expense of blowing up a few astronauts now and then"? Or maybe as a way to waste whatever space budget is left on a couple of uber-expensive flights per year instead of several flights with a smaller vehicle?
Yes, in an ideal world, where money and resources are unlimited, flying in style in a giant airplane would be cool. In the real world, you have a finite space budget. Wasting it on lifting something that size _and_ on trying to patch an unsafe design is actually detrimental. The same budget would allow a helluva lot more if it wasn't wasted on the shuttle.
Even the original shuttle design would disaggree with your assessment that the current shuttle is good. Just as a quick reminder:
The original shuttle design was, basically, the equivalent of a car. It was little more than a reusable capsule with wings. It was supposed to be reusable, cheap, safe, and pay for itself by doing lots of trips up and down. It also had buggerall cargo space and was only supposed to go into sane orbits.
Except NASA didn't have the budget for it. So they look at who else has a budget to put stuff in orbit: the Airforce. They're shooting these huge spy satellites into space. So NASA goes to the Airforce and says basically "you know, if you gave us your l(a)unch money, we could put those satellites in orbit for you safer and cheaper. And even bring them back down if needed! You won't have to launch another Titan rocket ever again. Won't that be nice?"
The Airforce payloads were, however, (A) bloody huge, and (B) went in a polar orbit, so they'd sweep over the soviet union. That's what the Airforce needed done. So if they're to give their space budget to NASA, then NASA had to guarantee they could do that. Enter the new shuttle concept: a freaking huge truck that can load one of those in its cargo bay.
Look at that huge cargo bay, and that's what it's for. It's not to give the astronauts leg room or anything, it's just big enough to pack one of those huge spy satellites.
The aftermath:
1. Even for those satellites, using a manned shuttle is fucking stupid. You don't need humans onboard to put a satellite into orbit, when a computer can do the same thing. And you don't need to deal with the media fallout when you blow up some humans. (Not to mention the irresponsibility of risking some human lives when you can do the exact same without them.) And you don't need to lift a huge ultra-expensive shuttle either, when you can just lift the satellite itself instead.
So do you want to know how those satellites are launched nowadays? By the Airforce, with a big rocket.
2. For smaller satellites, which was the original shuttle's idea, now the thing is too big and expensive. It's like using an 18 wheeler truck to haul your computer. It's just not worth it.
So how are all those satellites launched nowadays? With a smaller rocket.
3. For hauling humans into orbit, it's too big, too expensive, and too unsafe. And it becomes even more expensive by trying to patch that unsafe design.
4. But wait, isn't it used to haul materials up to the ISS? Isn't that worth having a huge flying truck? Well, guess what? The same applies as for the Airforce's satellites: the cargo can go up with a cheap rocket just as well. A computer can put it into any kind of orbit you want it in. And the Russians have been doing just that, for a fraction of the cost, _and_ more reliably. Who do you think supplies the ISS when the shuttle is grounded for months trying to figure out what foam to use and where? Right. Traditional Russian rockets do.
Even if you needed something assembled into space, there's no reason whatsoever to carry the humans and the cargo together. You can put the humans up with a small shuttle and whatever cargo they need up with a rocket.
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Proud Rememberer of the BBS Days.
(1) 1 tool, Tile repair
(2) 100 kg (lb?), Bondo
(3) 100 gallons, paint, primer, "battleship gray"
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"The astronauts would take refuge on the ISS while mission control in Houston attempt to land a damaged Shuttle."
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I know that the Oxygen generators on board the ISS are able to support life for 5 people right now IIRC... If Discovery is damaged during liftoff tomorrow, and the crew has to take refuge aboard the ISS, how long would it take NASA to get Atlantis or Endeavor up to save them? While I have every confidence in NASA, I am just wondering if any of you know how long the C02 scrubbers and O2 generators can hold out with 9 people on board?
-- Josh
"Whoopie! Man, that may have been a small one for Neil, but that's a long one for me!" - Pete Conrad
It is about time this capability was added to the shuttle. Makes if the return to flight test flights or some of the ISS construction missions could be flown unmanned.
an ill wind that blows no good
You seem to be stating that tractor trailers are the best vehicle ever for running to the gas station to pick up a gallon of milk.
So some space virus wipes out the crew, and Houston decides to remotely land the shuttle and bring the virus back to Earth. Good going, NASA, I was hoping to avoid the whole Captain Trips situation this century...
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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I remember hearing that it was a political move by the astronaut office that the landing gear had to be manually deployed, assuring them a job for the duration of the program.
You heard wrong. The shuttle gear is deployed manually to ensure that a short circuit doesn't inadvertently extend the gear while the shuttle is still in orbit, thus causing the tires and hydraulics to explode in the vacuum of space, rendering the shuttle unable to land.
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The cable enables flight controllers on the ground to land the Shuttle completely by remote control, including the ability to lower the landing gear
Well, I would *hope* it would include that ability, otherwise the whole thig is pretty useless isn't i t?
Just trying to figure out why the poster decided to include that comment. I mean, is that supposed to be some major accomplishment? It's probably just a signal "lower landing gear" to a system - seems like a very minor part of a complex operation to me.
Just wondering. I realize that it would only be used in an extreme emergency... and that even if the remote landing system didn't work properly, the surface of the earth is very large and the risk to people on the ground would be small.
I also wonder whether it wouldn't be possible (and perhaps safer) to use the shuttle's remaining fuel to lift it into some stable orbit... (thereby, of course, only postponing the problem).
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
NASA has just released a photo of their chief scientist in charge of remote control technology.
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... and it's not a conspiracy theory - it's because there's enough room for three people and a few post-it notes.
Getting in a Soyuz simulator un-suited is an unpleasant experience. Doing it for real is only for very dedicated people.
This is not something that people are going to want to get into space with big-time.
We've moved from something pointing to routine space travel (shuttle class vehicles) to glorified escape pods.
Yes, their stuff is reliable - so is a 1955 GMC stepside pickup. You want to use one to get a current big budget construction job done?
If we were still flying Gemini-era equipment, there'd be a crowd here yelling about how backwards we are.
They have not distinguished themselves in expanding horizons, pushing the envelope, whatever you want to call it.
Yes, they have far less resources, but that's like saying a kart racer is the real winner at LeMans, just cause he got out there.
As for "stayed technologically superior" - if by that you mean it auto-landed, then remember the only two-orbit flight was done with no environmentals or on-board software other than what was needed to complete a pre-programmed flight. And that was it. The rest are incomplete and never flew. You may want to factor in the fact that one of the vehicles and its launch equipment sat in an old hangar so long that they and the building they sat it rotted and collapsed, killing 8 people.
I'll take existing STS over Buran any day, I'll take a 99% STS over Soyuz or CEV.
Before you bring up the safety issue - what do we find acceptable? NASCAR has had 32 drivers killed, and we still hand them $1.3B every year. NASA's FY 2007 request is $1.7B.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
My brother is an airline pilot. A Kat C procedure lets a modern airliner basicly land fully automatic (sight below 150ft.). However, if the weather conditions allow it they will land that damn thing by hand just for the fun of it (and for not to loosing training, it's said that older pilots have particularly problems flying manually because some of them get out of training due to too much auto-piloting).
Wow. This is an example of a little information being a dangerous thing.
First of all, it's called a "Category III ILS Precision Approach", not a "Kat C procedure. It requires 3 criteria to all be in place in order to be attempted. The landing facility must be equipped, certified, and current. The airplane must be equipped, certified, and current. And the pilot-in-command attempting the approach must be certified and current for Cat III approaches.
Secondly, it is not a routine landing. Not all runways at all airports are equipped with Cat III ILS. Airlines make a lot of flights to smaller airports that just have the basic Cat I or II ILS systems, or even localizer-only, ADF, or VOR non-precision approach guidance systems. Pilots land "by hand" almost all the time. The "auto-lands" are the rare occurences, and they are required to do them every so often to keep current.
Landing the space shuttle is very, very different from landing an airliner. The glideslope is ridiculously steep. There is no second chance. The shuttle is practically plummetting at between 6000 - 8000 feet per minute (normal aircraft descent at around 500 feet per minute when on approach for landing). The shuttle enters the approach pattern at over 35,000 feet. If it needs to do a 360 degree turn, it will lose over 30,000 in altitude. It has an absolutely horrible glide ratio. Its glideslope angle is 20 degrees (normal glideslope angle is 3 - 5 degrees). It comes in at almost 300 mph (waaaay too fast for any other normal aircraft). It truly is a very special aircraft.
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I hope everyone in Mission Control turns off their cell phones and other electronic devices during landing.
Um, wouldn't it be better to try to land the shuttle after everyone is safely off the ISS? The shuttle has copious amounts of Hydrogen and Oxygen and other supplies that could be useful for keeping people alive, while waiting for a rescue mission. Also the rescue mission could bring repair materials for the shuttle.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
Remote control landing, eh? How far we've come in 40 years of the Right Stuff.
Months earlier...
Astronaut: All these wonderful controls are nice; I can control the vehicle in any way possible. But what if I want you guys on the ground to control it? I'm tired of not being a monkey.
German scientist: Ya, ve cooooooooould fit the space cdaft with a remote control vire so you can be a chimp in a can.
Astronaut: Space "capsule"
German scientist, through gritted teeth: Space "capsoool"
Several months later...
German scientist, worried: "Vat do ve tell him?"
Astronaut, worried, then angry: "He's a pilot. You tell him the condition of his capsule"
(pause)
Astronaut, clicks voice: "John, we think the heat tiles have come loose."
Astronaut in space: "Ok, I'm linin' 'er up just as carefully as I can now. Firing the escape hatch to the ISS."
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
But the astronauts hated the idea of just being useless cargo, so they *demanded* some human input be required.
In what alternate universe do the astronauts have any authority at all over the design engineers at NASA?
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NASA is running out of shuttles (only 3 left) and it would be exceedingly difficult to produce more
Not to be pedantic, but strictly speaking, there are 4 shuttles left (Enterprise, Endeaver, Atlantis, Discovery). Enterprise is a non-spaceworthy testing and training unit that I believe is in a museum now, but if they needed to bring another shuttle into service, they wouldn't be starting from scratch. They do have a mothballed shuttle they could modernize and bring into service.
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Does this include flying the HAC turn as well, for alignment with the runway? That's quite a thing to have to do manually over a data link... As well as the actual landing itself.
Or does the Shuttle already have this capability, and the remote is only for the Air Data probes and landing gear?
TheHustler
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So, who's the schmuck that gets the responsibility of gliding this thing in (which has the glide slope of a friggin' brick), and what kind of controls are they using? Are they gonna build a Shuttle cockpit relpica to land this pig, or is it just gonna be a 15" CRT and a second-hand Saitek joystick?
It takes control-line flying to a whole new level...
One of the components they're bringing up to the ISS is a new oxygen generation system, that should be able to support the combined crews for an extended period of time.
Seriously, it's easy to postulate any number of disasters happening at the same time, but what are the odds?
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
The Shuttle, due to it's configuration, has what is called a "non-minimum phase response" in pitch. Simply put, when you pull back on the stick, it goes down for a while first, then, after it gets sufficient angle of attack, it will start to climb. It does the opposite when you push the stick forward. That is, the increse in wing camber makes it want to go up first, then, as it pitches down, it will start to dive. So, in addition to all the issues stated above, there is also this rather nasty behavior.
A goal is a dream with a deadline
On the contrary. My father-in-law works for LockMart and he got to witness a launch from Baikonor of a LM vehicle using a motor designed with the help of (IIRC) Energia (it was basically a "here's a lot of cash, we want your motor" deal). It was the first time since Saturn that the US was able to put up such a huge payload using one of our puny non-shuttle birds. The engineers were rightfully impressed, and we have lots to thank the Russians for. Hell, all of our plans for the "shuttle replacement" look a heck of a lot like the Russian lifting-body-atop-a-tube designs.
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You mean 'jimp' :)
an ill wind that blows no good
Snakes, space, Samuel L Jackson, swearing, gold!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Damn right. I hope they have at least a 19" TFT and a Thrustmaster HOTAS
Or better yet, one of those force feedback joysticks, programmed to wantonly shake your hand arround for no other reason than because someone thought it was "immersive". I'm sure they'll appreciate the "immersion" and "realism" when aiming the shuttle at the runway.
Ok, now seriously, I think in reality they'll just let the computer do it. I'm pretty sure that when you're landing something that expensive, it's not a big problem to have Class III ILS on the runway you use for it. In which case it can just land itself.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
There's no turning back once those doors are opened.
Like that's much of an issue on landing since it's impossible to do a "go-around" in a glider anyway.
....what happens when they run out of shuttles *?*
I prefer space news here. Space.com is a bit noisy.
Model Plane Nerds, Now in complete and total control of NASA HQ removing the need for pilots, by god they built it, they have the right to fly it
Did someone say cake?
Each shuttle mission has many facets to it other than lauching satellites. Launching a communication satellite might be the primary task of one mission, but there are dozens other experiments that were performed each shuttle mission before the space station even existed.
So to piggy back on your analogy they aren't just picking up milk. They are checking the oil and tire pressure, getting gas, buying lottery tickets, buying a newspaper, getting a pack of gum, and buying a Slurpee for the ride home. Only the milk makes the news.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Nothing new about that: this was an issue as far back as Mercury.
Everybody figured the first spacecraft would be a follow-on to the research that produced the X-15, which in its highest flights became an official spacecraft (altitude > 100 km), complete with something that looked a lot like re-entry. NASA thought otherwise, and went for the Man in a Can approach. The first Mercury capsule design didn't even have any windows.
The rest is, as they say, history...
...laura
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Meanwhile the Russians have not lost a crew since Soyuz 11, in 1973. They have flown more than a hundred of the capsules since and lost no crew while the US was busy flying nowhere with a 100-tn orbiter with an empty payload bay - and 14 astronauts died.
Oh. And lets not forget. One soyuz flight (today) = ~20Million. One shuttle flight (today) = ~450 Million. Bummer, and I thought this was the country that looked at price tags.
Good luck using Bondo and "battleship grey" primer in orbit - I guess it could be a space first!
Am I mistaken, or is it not a problem at all?
The Shuttle is safe to fly. Don't believe me? Run the numbers:
This page gives us ~ 5 fatal crashes per million miles for commercial aviation, and 68 fatal accidents per million miles for general aviation in 2004.
Space Shuttle:
1045.99 days, 2 fatal accidents = 79 fatal accidents per million hours. That's in the same range as general aviation, and only an order of magnitude higher than commercial aviation. Not bad for a craft which travels seventeen thousand miles per hour to break away from the earth, then re-enter the atmosphere at mach 25. It looks even more amazing when you consider: the orbiter is technically still experimental; what else do you call a craft which has been manufacturered less than a dozen times, each with its own customizations? Certainly not a PRODUCTION model.
And don't tell me this is a bad comparison. Just like the Space Shuttle, aircraft spend most of their operating hours in cruise. And just like aircraft, the Shuttle is most likely to suffer an accident during takeoff and landing. If you believe that commercial airline flights are as safe as they can be, then the 79 accidents per million miles for the Shuttle is an exemplary safety record.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
People trust their lives to "computer" controls all the time. Aircraft autopilot comes to mind, as well as many others. The thing is, the "computer" controls have been proven reliable. When some people read computer controls, they thing of a windows pc with some software thats controlling something. That obiously isn't the case or we'd have shuttles falling out of the sky. I'm no rocket scientist, but I expect they use control systems similar to automation in manufacturing - simplified hardware, simplified programming, and validation that would make the FDA blush. They're not pushing the limits of these controls systems, they're pushing the limits of the mechanical systems. Think of all the shuttle catastrophes were the cause was a mechanical/structural system compared to a computer control system problem. You could say the same for the airline industry for that matter - seems to always be pilot error or mechanical/structural.
Of course those comparisons will go out the window when Skynet takes over in 2029 and starts producing the neural net processors (the learning computers)
I for one would like to welcome our new Cyborg overlords.
Remote control Shuttle, that's one helluva R/C plane!
--Somewhere there is a village missing an idiot.
That's about right. The USSR's shuttle, Buran, made its test flight and landing unmanned.
Buran is a sad story. It worked fine; the USSR just couldn't afford operating it. One was finished and four were under construction when the Soviet Union collapsed. It's not, by the way, a duplicate of the US shuttle. Buran had no big engines and was launched on top of an expendable Energia booster. This made for a simpler system than the US's external tank feeding engines on the Shuttle, plus solid rocket boosters. There's less reusability, but as it turned out, the Shuttle needs so much work after each flight that the reusability wasn't that much of an economy.
The big advantage Buran had was that its thermal protection system was tougher than the Shuttle's. The Soviets learned from the US experience, developed tougher thermal protection tiles, and used more titanium. Remember, the US shuttle was designed in the 1960s.
Actually, I'll do just that: it's an utterly meaningless comparison.
1. It's not even using the same units. One is in crashes per million miles and the other is in crashes per million hours. I don't know how you compare hours to miles, but in my book that's bull. I'm sorry, but if I compared miles to hours even in a primary school science class, I'd get an F for that.
2. Then how about doing it in crashes per number of flights, then? No, seriously. If you tell me that the thing that counts is takeoff/landing and not hours or miles spent cruising, then why hand-wave in a metric that you yourself just declared meaningless?
Doubly so, when, again, it's not even apples to apples. Using hours or miles instead is only justified when you can imply that there's some proportionality between that and the things that do count. E.g., comparing accidents per million miles for two airplanes is only justified if you can imply that, on the average, a million miles means approximately as many flights for both. Now let's look at shuttles vs airplanes: for an airplane a flight is measured in hours (sometimes even less), while for the shuttle it can be as high as 17 days. So pay attention: the same number of hours does not translate into the same number of takeoffs and landings.
If you do take the number of flights into account, the same Wikipedia page tells you that there have been 2 fatal acidents in 114 flights. That's a 1.75% chance to go *boom* per flight. Now I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but something tells me that we'd have a major scandal if every 67'th flight was fatal.
3. Furthermore, for an airplane measuring it in miles or hours does make some sense, because an airplane could suffer an engine failure or terrorist attack in mid-flight too, while the shuttle is mostly just idle while in orbit. It isn't just "in cruise", it was just sitting there with the engines turned off.
4. But here's a metric that's right on that wikipedia page and might be a lot more meaningful: 2% chance to die per astronaut per flight. Again, I don't know what the numbers are for commercial aviation, but I do believe we'd have some major scandals if you had a 2% chance to die in each flight.
But to check that hypothesis, let's look at that Airplane Liability page you linked to. They say 635 fatalities in the USA in 2004. (Out of which only 13 for large commercial airlines.) If that were a 2% chance to die per flight, then in 2004 the USA would have had no more than 635 * 50 = 31,750 total persons times flights, including pilots, co-pilots, stewardesses, etc. It would also mean that only 13 * 50 = 650 people travelled with large commercial airlines. Does that sound freaking unbelievable yet? Something tells me there have been at least millions, so the the chance to die per flight must have been _much_ lower. Many orders of magnitude lower.
So basically if you take the metrics that _do_ matter, instead of handwaving in some stupid miles to hours comparison, the shuttle is a freakin' disaster compared to airplanes. It's not an exemplary safety record, it's not comparable to civilian aviation, it's just a freakin' disaster. It's several orders of magnitude less safe. If the shuttle were an airplane, no airline would want to have anything to do with it.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
That's good, because without the ability to remotely lower the landing gear, the controllers would pretty much just be executing a remote-control CRASH (if frosty foam can blow a hole in it, landing without the gear would almost definitely do more than just leave a "ding" in the fender.)
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Aha, Google eventually found something:
. html
http://yarchive.net/space/shuttle/shuttle_control
According to Mary Shafer herself:
"After the first S-turn on STS-1, the entire re-entry was hand-flown through STS-4, at which point the FCS was rewritten (and the e-seats removed). John Young took over the flying when the sideslip meter pegged and stayed pegged for several seconds, meaning that the limit had been exceeded. This happened because L_YJ was about half the size predicted and the wrong sign and not even the extremely robust FCS could deal with that much error. Cf Iliff & Shafer, "Extraction of Stability and Control Derivatives From Orbiter Flight Data", NASA TM-4500, June, 1993."
I would've posted this sooner, but the server is too slow . . . ;^D
I wonder if this tech could be used to target specific locations and make precision turns impossible for 19 amateur pilots?
Nah...
(sticks head in the sand)
T-RAD is a smaller version of the Cure In Place Ablative Applicator (CIPAA), a backpack-mounted system, that mixes two compounds together into a pink, goo-like material called STA-54. (emphasis added)
In other words, chewing gum!
The STA-54 material tended to bubble in a weightless environment
And bubble gum at that!
Some things never change. (Duct tape, of course, has long been standard equipment aboard the Shuttle.)
-- Alastair
Step 1. Build, design, and finish making the CEV concept vehicle or some sorta titan based ISS rescue boat.
Step 2. Send the shuttle up to the ISS and inject a bunch of reasonable doubt about re-entry safety. Thus stranding the Astronauts aboard the ISS.
Step 3. Go "OMG, teh poor astronauts" and have NASA go "Well we do have this rescue boat (CEV) we could send up" and get all shitloads of free press.
Step 4. Televise the rescue craft launch and make a big deal about it returning safely. ("Yay teh astronauts are safe!!!")
Step 5. Send the shuttle back down on Remote and make it make a big 'splosion over teh ocean. The Citizen drones of the USA will be cheering NASA for being so smart with (teh rescue) and sell merch' and stuff based off the new CEV you used to rescue the poor stranded 'nauts. Tie in a few movies and the public support for NASA will be so high you can send men to Mars ASAP!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
And the award for Best Selection of a Slashdot Nickname in Order to Get Modded-Up On an In-Joke goes to: "New Here".
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
Our shields are dropping!
Where's the override? THE OVERRIDE?!
Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
Wrong on both number of flights and cost. The fixed costs of a shuttle launch are roughly $55 million. Higher numbers (up to $1.3 billion if you divide every penny budgeted to the program by the number of missions) include research, development, and construction costs as well numerous facilities, training, miscellaneous staff, and sometimes payload. In comparison, a Soyuz launch costs somewhere around $50 million (I don't know what that includes, but I don't think it's everything). The Russians charge us $65 million for launches that we order. The $20 million figure is how much they charged Dennis Tito for his ride.
Soyuz is still a little under 100 manned missions total. They've had as many fatal accidents, but of course, fewer people involved in each. It's also gone through several major revisions.
Of course, both comparisons are a little unfair since Soyuz is a fraction of the size and complexity owing to its more limited purpose. The architecture is fundamentally safer, but it doesn't do as much. Furthermore, costs aren't quite the same in Russia anyway. One source I just googled up says engineers over there typically make around $14,000 usd equivalent per year, compared to $70,000 in the US. Between designing improvements, operations, maintenance, etc, labor is the biggest ongoing cost in the US shuttle program.
And this time they could mean it!
The units for all three numbers are fatal accidents per million miles, my mistake typing the wrong units. But as for you, YOU could have taken 5 minutes to check that my figures were RIGHT, the units were just typed in wrong. But no, you just went and laid into me.
While you were busy turning the numbers in your favor, and discrediting mine, you forgot two things:
* My mentioning of the fact that crashes are most likely during takeoff and landing does not ursurp the significance of my original statistic: that
the Shuttle has safety on the same order as general aviation. No aspect of spaceflight is so routine that you can ignore it statistically, not even the orbital flight portion.
There could be a critical failure of onboard equipment, or collision with derbis or the space station. The fact that we HAVN'T yet had an orbital accident only means we're more and more likely to see one. Would be very funny if, after all this preparation for another foam hit, the Shuttle explosively decompresses in-orbit because someone forgot to tighten a screw after fucking with the Shutle for the hundredth time this month.
* You're deluded that the Shuttle, a craft which moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER than a commercial passenger aircraft, and travels further than the average airline trip JUST TO GET TO ORBIT, should have anywhere near the same saftey record. The numbers I put forth, the crashes per million hours, look at the numbers from their good side, and your comparison looks at the numbers from their bad side. Somewhere in-between those is the true reliability for the Shuttle, and they're NOT THAT BAD.
My point is that, how could you NOT be satisfied with those numbers? This craft is EXPERIMENTAL. No two are exactly the same, and the later-built models benefited from the earlier ones. For a craft of such complexity and uniqueness, pushed to such excessive speeds and tensions, how could you expect anything more?
Remember your baby, the commericial aircraft industry (read: air bus)? It used to be quite dangerous to take a flight. In the last 35 years, the accident rate of commercial airlines has reduced over an order of magnitude! There also every indication that accident rates in the 50s and 60s were even higher!
Well, guess what folks? Right now our "space bus" industry is in the "1940s" of the commercial aircraft industry. Most of our spaceplanes are still custom-built, and there's still a lot left to learn. Commericial interestest are only just now starting to explore the possibilities of manned space flights. And you want the reliability of our commercial aircraft industry for the year 2000? You're NUTS.
Sure, the Space Shuttle isn't nearly as safe as modern aircraft, but that didn't stop people from flying fairly dangerous "air busses" back in the 1940s as the industry was budding. On the same line, the Space Shuttle is a bit more dangerous than modern aircraft, but not so much that you can't justify the flight. Call me back when your head finds its way out of your ass.
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
The difference between a standard atmosphere and the vacuum of space is 14.696 psi. Airplane tires normally run around 120 psi. The extra ~15 psi is within the design of the tires. Also, the best information on google states that they are already exposed to vacuum.
Man, I am so distracted today. I should just give up.
The units are in fatal acccidents per million FLIGHT HOURS, not miles, despite the fact that I've posted miles TWICE...
Man is the animal that laughs.
And occasionally whores for Karma.
but there are dozens other experiments that were performed each shuttle mission before the space station even existed.
Isn't that what the ISS and the other space stations were for?
The shuttle isn't just a flying semi, it's a flying semi with a extended cab that includes a lab. Why don't we just leave it up there and convert it into a space station?
The idea is simple: You launch cargo on the cheap dumb booster of the appropriate size. You launch people using a high reliability rocket, with a high reliability but simple and fairly inexpensive return vehicle. They then do their work at the station.
You do not try to use the dangerous and inefficient at everything shuttle. Though heck, why not redesign the shuttle and use it for missions from the ISS to other satellites to perform maintenance? How about doing some remodeling and launching it one last time to serve as an actual space station?
So to piggy back on your analogy they aren't just picking up milk. They are checking the oil and tire pressure, getting gas, buying lottery tickets, buying a newspaper, getting a pack of gum, and buying a Slurpee for the ride home. Only the milk makes the news.
To continue your example, all this doesn't require a truck either, it can be done with any econobox car.
I don't read AC A human right
No, loser. Nice backpedalling, but nope. I actually checked your maths before writing that answer:
1046 days = 25104 hours
2 accidents per 25104 hours = 2 * 1,000,000 / 25104 accidents per million hours = 79.6 accidents per million hours
Remember that 79 number? That's the same one you've used. So, yes, your number for the shuttle was indeed per million hours. There's no way for that to be per million miles, unless you're telling me that the shuttle travels at one mile per hour.
And oh, looky, even inside the same message, Mr Prom Queen still can't make up his mind about whether it was miles or hours. Just three paragraphs lower you try to salvage the "per million hours" number with that "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" reasoning. Which of them is it, loser? No, you can't have both. Was it miles for both, in which case "moves THIRTY TIMES FASTER" is fucking irrelevant to that statistic, or was it hours, in which case you did write a stupid comparison all over the first message?
Seriously, you're fucking pathetic. I see no reason to even attempt any kind of logical or scientiffic conversation with the pathetic kind of prom queen that will even argue two exact opposites in the same message, more concerned with saving image and shifting blame than with any kind of logic, science or even with showing some basic human dignity. You have all my heart-felt contempt. Grow up. Grow a spine.
Ah well...
As for the rest of the argument, I have nothing against the "but it's experimental" or "but it goes at a different speed" lines of reasoning. Of course. We all know it's experimental, and NASA is still busy discovering what foam, insulation washers, etc, can do and where they can go. Yep, no disaggreements there. That much is pretty common knowledge. All I'm refutting is the notion that it's somehow as safe as civilian aviation nowadays. It isn't. Not even close.
Even _with_ an extra order of magnitude introduced in there, it still remains a helluva lot safer than the Space Shuttle. One order of magnitude down, about 3-4 more to go. Heh. Even 35 years ago, heck, even in the 40s, the only airplane that tended to blow up by itself more than the shuttle was the Me 163 Komet rocket fighter. Much like the Shuttle, it was a highly experimental, liquid fuel rocket powered aircraft, with a very rough landing and a tendency to blow up even without anyone shooting at it. Probably more were lost to take off and landing than to enemy fire.
Still, at least there _is_ a comparable aircraft in that time period. I have no problem if you want to compare the Shuttle to the Me 163 disaster
Just not with modern aviation, that's all I'm saying.
Heh. Call me back when you grew enough of a spine and learned about personal responsibility. For example about honestly admitting a mistake instead of pulling a prom-queen maneuver of pretending you've said something else.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
The shuttle is now 30 years old. (Yup! first shuttle rolled out in 1976...)
NASA (and the funding behind it, namely Congress) should get their act together on a modern replacement. Either the cheapest possible method to get people into orbit, or concentrate their money on robotic replacements.
Adding a "module to remotely land the craft" speaks well to the fact that people are not needed on board.
Adding that module as an "add on dumped in the cargo bay" speak well to the fact that it is duct tape put on a very old machine.
The shuttle is like the Energizer Bunny for two reasons IMHO:
Everybody wants "man in space" but is not willing to spend the money to do it right.
The re-outfiting of the shuttle for each new flight has been set up to spread the money spent across multiple states, and multiple congressional districts. Depending on where you are, it's either "pork" or "bringing home the bacon" and that gets it throug the funding process in congress.
Serious money spent on robotic space exploration would get you good "bang for the buck" but people want an "Apollo 11 on Mars" because it is a lot sexier. Robotic exploration does not have to worry about all the life support issues, and can be more cost effective.
I am in favor of both, but the glory days of NASA ended back in the early 70's, now it is just another inefficient government agency. The "cold war" is over...
Anybody here running a 30 year old computer? I doubt it. Why are we still flying a 30 year old shuttle?
www.effectiveelectrons.com "chips that work" Analog, RF, Mixed Signal
What this all means is that manual intervention, in a way, is still required in order to deploy the landing gear. There is no chance that the remote control mechanism will inadvertently trigger deployment.
The real problem with the shuttle is that we're flying essentially a prototype as if it was a production model. When the shuttle was designed, even without the really massive pile of political crap that surrounded it, there were a lot of unanswered questions. The only way to answer them was to build and fly one.
Unfortunatly, once we did that and got our answers, there was no budget or political will to do a redesign based on the new knowledge. The only reason a new aircraft can be built that doesn't require a redesign after the test flights is because we have several decades of design experiance with them. We know what tends to work and what doesn't. When the shuttle was first designed, nobody had any experiance at all with designing space planes. There were no experianced space plane designers who could say "In my experiance, that design looks good on paper but never works in the real world.". There was little or no opportunity to look at a novel design for a part and try it out on an otherwise proven space plane before we commit to using it in the new plane.
The best thing to do would be to build a complete shuttle and fly it to see what doesn't work so well, try a few improvements, then design and build a second one incorporating what was learned. Then, try a few more changes on each so we could design and build a 3rd generation shuttle.
In any event, we now know that the rcc panels on the leading edges are not sturdy enough to handle nearly inevitable debris impacts during launch. What I'm wondering is why not cover those surfaces with foam 'bumpers' for launch and let those burn off during reentry. Probably because even if it works, the shuttle program is dead.
Can't help but think that
might mean a bunch of astronauts with little enough to do and little enough to eat. It occurs to me that they might want to encourage mission control to do something for them and that this encouragement might be in song form. I suggest the song which begins- Oh show me the way to go home;
- I'm tired an' I wanna go to bed
Remember that one ? An oldy but a goody - especially in that situation. Another of the same type begins- I'm tired and hungry;
- but still carry on
.....
Just a thought. May we hope that they would have no problems with the RIAA ?How many beans make five, anyhow ?
...the communications blackout during atmospheric re-entry?
They never delivered so much as a can of beans to useful orbit. One flight. Two orbits. No passengers. They were disabused by a program that can barely function. The only flight vehicle was destroyed because they couldn't so much as fix a hangar roof. They will never return. It was a copy of the STS with modifications - largely the result of watching the development of a largely feature-frozen STS and making changes with the benefit of hindsight. The shuttle fleet HAS had upgrades in its performance - most publicly the avionics, but in carrying capacity due to external tank and airframe redesigns (each orbiter save Challenger was rebuilt from the ground up) and three phases of main engines - which are now nearly 10% more powerful than the originals. My original point stands. We're not just talking LEO - you have to think of a progression of vehicles, and despite its shortcomings, STS does that. It points tht way to making space travel a wider path than its predecessors. There is a continuum of US vehicles that points the way to the designs needed for more space exploration. Not so Soyuz. They tried a shuttle, failed, and are now back to a ship from the 60s. I fear we may go down the same path.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
I said: before the space station even existed
The U.S. didn't always have space stations during the reign of the shuttle, so the answer would be no.And I wasn't arguing for or against the original idea of having a shuttle. I was merely pointing out that there is more to the shuttle's mission than you credited it.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
There were space stations before ISS. Skylab, for example was launched in 1973. The shuttle didn't launch for the first time until 1981
Given the history of shuttle costs, it would have been far more efficient to just launch more space stations occasionally.
For example, we could of had 5 years experience with skylab, spent 3 years designing a better one and launched that at the same time as the shuttle would have launched for the first time. Then launch a new one every ten years or so.
At the same time, redesign and update the capsules to launch from.
I don't read AC A human right
Skylab wasn't used after 1974 and reentered in 1979. That makes for a whopping 1 year of use. The ISS wasn't around until 1998, so they used the shuttle in the interim. For reasons that I do not know, NASA favored the shuttle over space stations. Now the U.S. (and the int'l community) have a space station and are scrapping the shuttle anyway.
So talk about what is GOING to happen and don't harp on the past with coulda, shoulda, woulda. Anything else is whining.
Sierra Tango Foxtrot Uniform
Okay, my quick version of what should be done:
Step 1: Create crash program to develop people mover replacement for shuttle. It should have only limited cargo capacity. Currently I'm leaning towards an apollo/Soyuz type system, though a small spaceplane might also work. Dusting off some of the canceled replacements for the shuttle wouldn't be a bad idea, assuming they weren't canceled because they were turning out to have worse problems than the shuttle. New materials technology can help there.
Step 2: Launch things such as satellites and space station components/supplies with dedicated, unmanned rockets.
Step 3: Say the heck with the ISS, put up a new station in a better orbit for us. Or at least finish the ISS, get a dedicated escape vessel or three so we can actually use the thing for the amount of research it was intended for. Don't send anything down that you don't have to. It costs too much to send stuff up. Start work on designing a zero-g hydroponics(or aeroponics, or whatever) module, as well as a 'solar furnace' module to recycle materials, even if only as additional shielding at first.
Step 4: Want to service the hubble/other satellite? Send up a mobile 'space servicer' that's mobile, but not intended for reentry, though making it emergency capable of such wouldn't be a bad idea. It's serviced and launched from a space station. Replacement parts, if possible, are sent up with the routine resupply missions.
I don't read AC A human right