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NASA Campaigns For Safer Launch Requirements
NASA officials will speak before members of Congress this week in an effort to gain support for more stringent launch safety considerations for the space shuttle's successor. Crew safety remains a major concern for lawmakers while they debate NASA's future and the potential integration of private companies into US space flight plans.
"The demonstrated probability of a shuttle launch disaster is 1 in 129. NASA's 83 astronauts think those odds can be improved to 1 in 1,000. Independent safety experts agree. 'None of us want to repeat the accident history of the shuttle,' said retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Dyer, chairman of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, a group organized to oversee NASA programs after three astronauts died in the 1967 Apollo 1 launch pad fire. ... NASA's Astronaut Office began a re-evaluation of next-generation launch vehicle safety after the loss of Columbia's crew. The guiding principles laid out in a May 2004 report remain current, astronauts said. Launching astronauts into low Earth orbit is dangerous. But an order-of-magnitude reduction of risk is achievable 'and should therefore represent a minimum safety benchmark for future systems,' the report says."
I can certainly appreciate that they want to do better, but it still amazes me that we send people into F'ING SPACE with less than 1% failure rate.
Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?
I realize this view is mighty unpopular, yet I am going to express it. While science is very important, so are social issues. I would like to see the NASA budget considerably shrunk but for only a short period of time, say 12 - 18 months. We have to get our country healthy again and space flight really only effects a small sector of the economy. It will create jobs but only at the most educated levels. A healthy country is a more efficient and productive one. Now, you may feel free to mod me but are you willing to join the censors?
I don't have an opinion one way or another, but I am quite sure that it is infeasible to cut NASA's budget in half for 18 months and then expect them to continue as if nothing happened...
What does a "shrunk budget" mean? Firing reseachers, firing engineers, cancelling projects with industry... And if you as an engineer got fired, you would presumably look for another job with more security and better pay in the private sector and not come back after 18 months into a shitty job where they will eliminate your position at a whim... In short, they can't just mothball manpower, because it won't come back.
I sincerely hope that people understand such legislation has its foundations in the fact that launch vehicles are very expensive and nothing to do with the pilots and passengers.
Even taking into account the investment made in people while training astronauts can be sizeable it still pales in comparison to the expense of using a chemical rocket to boost a tiny payload into low earth orbit. $10,000 per pound in 2001 dollars.
Once the price of lobbing things into space becomes reasonable, there will be deaths, once again nobody will care in the same measure nobody other than relatives of the victims bats an eye when a plane crashes today.
What does NASA expect of all of the space programs? To have an unrealistic safety record which would put General Products to shame? Sometimes the tree of science needs to be watered with the blood of the brave and the bold.
NASA can not afford accidents, not because of the sanctity of human life or any nonsense like that, but because it will kill NASA and probably manned spaceflight in this country in general. Colombia very nearly killed the shuttle program entirely, before a successor was even on the drawing board. People are willing to accept that being an astronaut is dangerous, but a lot of people look up to them, and when a bunch of them explode in a ball of fire over Texas in an entirely preventable accident, the PR impact is catastrophic. Even privately funded spaceflight will get shut down (in this country at least) if it has too many high profile accidents. Even if in reality the cost in lives is minuscule compared to what we lose daily in car accidents or lung cancer from smoking, a few big accidents in a row and the politicians will see "stopping the reckles endangerment of human lives" as a way to score some cheap votes. If human beings were rational and logical, you'd have a point, but we aren't, and too many astronaut funerals on TV will inevitably cause a kneejerk reaction.
Unpopular? No, it's simply idiotic.
The whole history of launching stuff into space in basically strapping something onto a bomb, and trying to control the way it explodes.
Comparing the earliest manmade flights, basically using ICBMs, to... to....
I was going to say today's tech, but the shuttle is almost 30 years old, so it really isn't today's tech.
Soyuz? Proton? Ariane?
It's all still focusing a huge amount of volatile explosives to a constricted area, hoping it doesn't all go pear shaped.
Add to that environmental concerns (this bug that's 10,000 miles away won't fuck if it so much as smells rocket exhaust, so use something else),
it's a wonder we get up there as safely as we do.
The demonstrated failure rate is ABSOLUTELY meaningless with such a low rate of loss. The actual failure rate could be 1 in 10 or 1 in 10,000, but with only 129 samples and 1 failure, you've got no idea which one it really is. Maybe we're already at 1 in 1000.
I hate this probabilistic view anyway. If you know that the failure rate should be 1 in 1000, then you must know what will fail .1% of the time. Fix those flaws and now you should have a perfect vehicle. Of course, you don't have a perfect vehicle, because there are problems you don't know about. So when you think that you have a 1 in 1000 rate, you actually will have a lower one. So, if the goal is to get to a rate that is 1 in 1000, once we're there the unknowns might lower it to 1 in 129, which is where we are (demonstratively) at.
Put another way, think about how safe the space shuttle is now. In its service lifetime, we've seen two fatal flaws demonstrated: foam and O-rings. The O-rings have been fixed and the foam has been mitigated. Over 129 launches, every dangerous problem has been fixed, minimized, or mitigated. Now we're going to dump a vehicle that has had 30 years of improvements built in and hope to do better with a new design.
It would be like if we did a "rm -rdf ." on the kernel archives, stuck Linus and the kernel developers in a room, and let them start over. How long would it take to redevelop an OS that is as secure as Linux? Linux has 20 years of development and security fixes. Even with a better design plan and all of the combined experience, would it take them a year to duplicate the safety? Two years? Five? Ten?
You know, of course, that the AIG bailout alone would pay for 10 years of running NASA at current budget levels?
That the Iraq war would pay for 41 years, and the Afghanistan one for an additional 17?
The 17.6 billion NASA got this year wouldn't pay for much, much less the 9 billion you want to take.
Removing NASA (as a halving of the budget effectively would do, as written by posters above) would reduce US prestige quite a bit, though.
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I'm all in favor of increased spending on domestic priorities, but NASA's budget is not the place to look. The real money is in the defense/homeland security budgets, which combined are pushing a trillion dollars a year (when you include costs for various wars, VA costs, and actual DOD/DHS budgets). Why is it, exactly, that we're spending more on the DOD alone than the entire rest of the world - combined - spends on defense?
... by just not going at all. The point is that we have an obligation to provide a launch system for our astronauts that provides reasonable levels of safety for them. It is just plain unethical even to ask people to volunteer for what amounts to a game of Russian roulette without a much better reason than messing around with the ISS.