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Images of Endeavour's Damaged Tiles
Roland Piquepaille writes "Neptec Design Group, a Canadian company and a NASA prime contractor for 25 space missions, was kind enough to send me exclusive images of Endeavour's damaged tiles during its last take-off. So here are some of these pictures" The pictures are pretty amazing and make the urgency of this whole thing much more amazing.
maybe we should leave the rocket scientist stuff to real rocket scientists...
It always amuses me how the masses sitting on the sidelines always feel they can do better then the trained professionals. I'm assuming you've already done the calculations between risk of the loss of them doing a spacewalk vs tile damage, where the tile is positioned, and taken into account the fact before Columbia that tiles fell off without incident. I could be wrong, but I'm just as qualified as you are. So is the guy I bought a hotdog from yesturday for that matter.
This would be like my mom telling me she can do computer support better then me. She's a smart lady, but her KNOWLEDGE level when it comes to Computers is low.
Astronauts have balls of steel to begin with. Two sets. You're sitting, surrounded by just how much in explosive fuel? Blasted into one of the most uninhabitable climates for human survival. (Ranks up there with volcano caldera and bottom of ocean...) Then set on a 100 mile free fall course to the Earth, the same trip many meteors take, and burn up well before hitting the ground most of the time.
And yet I so want to do it for myself...
It's more like the engineers got hamstrung by the Air Force and the beancounters. Original shuttle plans called for a fully-reuseable vehicle with a more robust thermal protection system. The beancounters promoted the half-disposable design we have now, claiming it would reduce costs, and contrived studies to show that it would be much more reliable than it actually turned out to be. They also screwed around with the budgeting, eventually causing even more cost overruns, delaying the development, and forcing compromises that made the vehicle less safe.
The Air Force wanted manned space capability, and offered to help pay for the development if they got some say in the design and were allowed use of the shuttles when built. The USAF insisted on a larger payload bay (60ft long, as opposed to NASA's 40ft plan), which obviously made the vehicle larger. They also wanted the ability to land at the launch site after a single polar orbit, requiring 1000+ miles of crossrange. This led to the heavier delta wing and higher reentry heating loads.
We wound up with a vehicle that was larger, more expensive, and less safe than we should have. The engineers did the best they could under the political mandates they were given.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
The problem with the shuttle is not any specific design decision it's the overall design goals which the "top-end engineers at NASA" had little to do with.
"The crucial factor in the size and shape of the Shuttle Orbiter was the requirement that it be able to accommodate the largest planned spy satellites, and have the cross-range recovery range to meet classified USAF mission's requirement for a one-around abort for a polar launch." The most obvious bad design decision was to send cargo up in a manned mission. Manned vehicles cost a lot more per pound sent to space than unmanned so mixing the two increases the cost of sending stuff to orbit with zero real gain. The other issue is the requirement for a polar orbit. (Think Russia) Getting people to space is hard but doable getting people to space and a polar orbit is a much harder task that is a waste of resources 99% of the time.
Second "Each Shuttle was designed for a projected lifespan of 100 launches or 10 years' operational life." However, Discovery was built in 1985 its last flight is scheduled for 2010.
If you want a cheep reusable rocket rebuild the shuttle with 5% its cargo capacity, a slow reentry, and skip the polar orbit concept and you get a much larger safety margin and a much less extreme operating environment and a lower cost per person to orbit.
Both of the deadly shuttle accidents are directly attributable to the side-by-side nature of the orbiter and the fuel tanks and SRB's. This design should have been discarded. If the shuttle were stacked vertically, these particular failures would have been impossible.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan