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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."
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?
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).
Spaceshuttle is able to land fully automatically too, however it is said that the pilots usually prefer to land that damn thing manually (if saftey allows it) just because they might never ge a chance to do that again.
A saying among avationists says: "Landing is flying". it is usually the most challenging and interesting job during a flight.
This "feature" was there to give the hightly-trained and expensive pilots sopmething to do during a mission where they are essentially passengers for 99.99% of the time..........
T.
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Shuttle could have had this capability forever as well. 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.
I am not sure that "Buran" means "snow-storm" in russian, despite it was written like that on wikipedia and babelfish.altavista.com also translates it like that.
It does. The Russian word for "bura" is "burya".
The Russians did their Buran thing with no fan fare yet and it was more modern and stayed technologically superior to anything we Americans produced for 17 years. Heck we even do not know what they have in store for us.
For sure...if they can control their spaceships from earth, I do not see why landing a shuttle remotely is that tough. Please do not diminish the Russian achievements.
In Soviet Russia.... they certainly did brag about their achievements. For instance, Sputnik and Gagarin got huge exposure. But until they had achieved their aim, they preferred to keep quiet, so if it did go pear shaped they could just pretend they weren't even trying.
The landing gear has been, up until now, virtually the only piece of the shuttle that was not automated or not able to be controlled remotely.
On the shuttle, once the landing gear is down, it is down for good. It cannot be retracted, and opening the landing gear doors compromises the heat shield.
Thus, the designers of the shuttle were weary of the fact that a computer glitch could cause the gear to open up while in orbit or too high up on the descent, causing a chatestrophic mission failure from which there would be no chance of recovery. Instead, they instructed the pilots to flip a mechanical switch once the shuttle reached a certain altitude.
I guess they're at the point where they trust the computers enough to link them to this system.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Externally, the Soviet shuttle design appeared to be a copy of the American. But that's as far as that went. Buran had no engines for a start, it was strictly a payload for Energia. Certainly the engineers who created Buran looked at the American shuttle when they were coming up with the general principle, but in the same way that an aircraft designer looks at other aircraft.
One could say that Airbus copied Boeing because airliners all look pretty similar. One would be an idiot to make that comment though, the reality is that they are vastly different beasts.
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Externally, the Soviet shuttle design appeared to be a copy of the American. But that's as far as that went. Buran had no engines for a start, it was strictly a payload for Energia. Certainly the engineers who created Buran looked at the American shuttle when they were coming up with the general principle, but in the same way that an aircraft designer looks at other aircraft.
One could say that Airbus copied Boeing because airliners all look pretty similar. One would be an idiot to make that comment though, the reality is that they are vastly different beasts.
So, you're calling me an idiot because I pointed out that the Russians made a space glider that's a copy of an american product?
The thing looks externally like the shuttle, it has no engines, probably uses aerlerons like every other aircraft & manuvering thrusters in space, little is known about it's never-tested life support- so you're basically telling me that the only thing the russians did for the Buran that was special was make it fly home by itself.
Color me unimpressed. If the Russians didn't even bother to put engines on it, the entire project is a dumbed down copy of a shuttle with autopilot, and little in the way of innovation.
Like I said before, this isn't the project to use when you explain how much you loved the soviets.
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms should be the name of a store, not a government agency.
Actually, this is, near enough, the only design for the job. Or at least, the most efficient design, if you want a device which will fly back to a landing space.
Actually, the Russians made a more sensible design than us. They saw that there was no hope of making a motorised device which would be self-contained, and concentrated on the rocket for the prime mover.
That was a very far-sighted decision - we were too busy thinking we could make the things we saw in movies and magazines, and stuffed ourselves royally. Now we are going back to rockets with the Shuttle Replacement, and we have lost all those years of experience.
Especially a glider with the aerodynamic profile of a bottle of spring water with the label half torn off.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Likewise the SST program is not one to use when claiming American superiority of anything.
Sure we managed to build a fleet a and fly it, but the program is a dismal failure as is the ISS.
The shuttle fleet were designed for 100 flights each and a service life span or 10 years. The program was intended to be a routine "bus" service to orbit. Of the five flyable units built, two have self-destructed due to design and maintenance failures. On every criteria the program was founded for they have not even remotely lived up to the intentions. I call that a failure.
The equivalent would be purchasing a car that you intend to drive to work every day, but instead it only works once every six months. Oh... and almost half of the cars sold will spontaneously explode killing everyone on board. The repair costs will skyrocket every year since the continual failures will cause a feedback loop to where every major component has to be completely inspected and/or re-built after every use.
Who's to blame? The political process in the U.S Government that continually starves NASA's budget is part of it. NASA's own administration is also a large part of it; they have become so wound up in the minutia, they forget to look up and see the stupidity of the questions they are trying to answer.
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Have the landing gear signal go through one to several interlocks (already done in all passenger planes), serially, so no signal can ever get through unless (a)... (b)... (c)... (d)...
Of course, now you've skewed to the oposite end of the spectrum -- sure, you don't have to worry about the landing gear accidentally deploying, but now you have to worry that some tiny malfunction is going to cause it not to deploy at all!
The manual system has one really good thing going for it: Simplicity.
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.
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The US didn't see a need for it in the shuttle until now.
More like: the astronauts refused to allow it until now. The Shuttle program, along with the Apollo and Gemini programs before it (and to a lesser extent, Mercury), is pretty much controlled (politically and administratively) from Houston, by astronauts and former astronauts in management positions. Dating back to the original Mercury astronauts, they have insisted on an element of manual control with no computer in the loop. This is partially a control issues (recall the original astronauts were almost all test pilots), and partially job security and ego. The use of chimpanzees on the first couple of Mercury flights led to some embarrassing comparisons.
While few of today's astronaut corps come out of the test pilot tradition, the "mandatory man in the loop" is ingrained into NASA culture, and defended fiercely by JSC (if you don't need men (or women) aboard, do you need a Manned Spaceflight Center?).
Mind, I'm all for putting people in space -- the more the merrier, and what's a little risk if the people are willing to take it? But refusing to install a capability they could have had 20 years ago (and autoland for aircraft goes back way further than that) for ego reasons is stupid.
-- Alastair
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.
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