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Shuttle Endeavour Blasts Off For Space Station
Gwmaw writes "The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad on Monday on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station. The 4:14 a.m. EST (0914 GMT) blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center shattered the predawn tranquility with a deafening roar and a brilliant tower of flames that momentarily turned the dark Florida sky as bright as day." HD video of launch attached.
Shuttle supply chain is winding now for quite some time, I wouldn't be very surprised if continuing it would be end up similarly costly to pushing Constellation and both Ares rockets forward...but with only three orbiters and not much to do with them.
Shuttle is past its time; it wasn't really used as intented (landing quickly after launch to escape shutdown attempt), bringing down satellites was quickly abandoned, new space telescopes are beyond its abilities anyway, and we can launch space station modules performing rendezvous by themselves. We just need it this last few times to launch modules...designed to be launched by Shuttle.
One that hath name thou can not otter
Now that the return to the moon has been cancelled, I wonder if NASA will extend Shuttle missions beyond this year?
Extremely unlikely; Congress zeroed out the money to do that, and so the parts simply aren't in the pipeline and the facilities to prepare for flights beyond 2010 have shut down. If they wanted to keep the shuttle flying, they needed to have kept that option open (with funding) several years ago.
If they do extend shuttle flights it will only take a few years to blow up the ones they have left....
It may be modded funny right now, but its also correct. If an orbiter is destroyed every 50 flights, and they launch ten times per year
I don't think any of these assumptions are correct. It was about a hundred flights between the first shuttle loss and the second, so it's hard to justify an estimated loss rate much higher than about one in a hundred (and if the Columbia problem is indeen understood and mitigated, less.) And they've never had a flight rate of ten per year before, so it's unlikely that they would increase the flight rate when the program is cancelled.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Many people talking at the same time can be confusing, they probably can talk at the same time but don't to keep the confusion to a minimum.
I've taken a tours of both Kennedy's Control Room and Houston's Mission Control. There are several voice loops that NASA uses and they can be individually enabled or disabled at a headset. There are only a couple of people of people listening to more than a few loops at any one time during launch. The majority of the staff is focused on the particular system or sub-system assigned to them, and therefore only listening to the applicable voice loop(s).
There is of course a better solution: they should give up voice altogether and start using IRC.
I almost literally cut my teeth on MSDOS 2.0 (Dad gave me his old Eagle 81 computer when I was 5), so I have no fear of scrolling text. However, I don't think that would be net gain for NASA to drop the voice loops in favor of IRC. Remember that most of the people working in the control rooms are monitoring more than one screen already. The switch to IRC would require split their visual focus to yet another batch of visual information. Also, most people can listen to someone talk while watching something simultaneously without much difficulty because audio and visual information are processed in different parts of the brain. Thus using an audio feed is complementary rather than competing sensory input.
Not in the slightest. There's two big hurdles using the Shuttles as long term space stations or hooking them up to the ISS. The first is the electrical power systems of the Shuttles. To provide power while in space the Shuttle uses hydrogen fuel cells where the ISS uses solar panels. While the fuel cells provide a lot of power to the Shuttle they do have a finite fuel supply. The life support system aboard the Shuttle is also a short duration design using chemical CO2 scrubbers. At best a Shuttle station would need to be refueled and resupplied every few weeks. Besides power and life support the Shuttle doesn't really carry its own scientific payload. If you were going to leave one in orbit you would need to send it up with a SpaceLab module or something to be able to do anything useful.
Hooking a Shuttle up to the ISS for long periods would also not be very useful since without the weekly resupply of hydrogen and oxygen the Shuttle would be a power and life support vampire for the ISS. It would also affect the ISS' atmospheric drag such that it would require more reboosts than it already does. These could not be performed by the Shuttle because it carries a limited fuel for its OMS/RCS system which can't be refueled in orbit. A Shuttle plugged into the ISS for a long period of time would end up being a dead weight with no real scientific utility of its own.
The Shuttles were designed for relatively short term missions and for resupply and refurbishment on the ground. Leaving them parked in orbit is a nice thought but ultimately impractical.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Those thrusters operate for short periods of time at great intervals. Considerable effort is expended to set up the schedule such that usage of those thrusters, docking and undocking visiting ships, station attitude changes and other such events occur in clusters with lengthy intervals between them in order to provide the maximum time of 'uncontaminated' micro gee. (There's even a vibration isolation system on some experimental racks to minimize disturbance in between those events for experiments that require an even higher level of micro gee.)
So yes, continuous usage of an ion thruster will ruin the micro gee environment, and yes this will be a great disruption to experiments onboard.
There are a couple good reasons to place it at the altitude it is. One is the higher it is the less cargo you can ferry there (you trade height for fuel mass). Another is space junk. If it is in a height that needs regular boosts to stay there, it also means junk that happens to be in that altitude will fall down to Earth, rendering that space relatively junk free. The station would need more bulletproofing if it were to go higher.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
The original poster specified an ion engine, which must operate continuously or nearly so in order to have any significant effect on the station's orbit.
Now, you could use normal thrusters (preferably from an external source to conserve Zvezda's fuel) to raise the orbit, but you cannot raise it significantly without affecting the ability of other servicing craft (Soyuz, Progress, ATV, HTV, Dragon) to utilize their full design capacity. (The higher the orbit, the lower the delivery capacity.) You can't raise it high enough to significantly reduce atmospheric drag without getting into the region where those craft, at best, no longer have a useful cargo capacity or may not be able to reach it at all.