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Astronaut Careers May Stall Without the Shuttle
Hugh Pickens writes "NPR reports that former shuttle commander Chris Ferguson now moonlights as a drummer for MAX Q, a classic rock band comprised solely of astronauts. 'Perhaps we'll have some more time to practice here once the shuttle program comes to a slow end,' says Ferguson, raising the question — what does the future hold for NASA's elite astronaut corps after the agency mothballs its aging space shuttles in the coming months? NASA currently has about 80 active astronauts, as well as nine new astronaut candidates hired last year. But there will be fewer missions after the shuttle program ends, and those will be long-duration stays at the space station. When the Apollo program ended, astronauts had to wait years before the space shuttles were ready to fly, but the situation was different back then. Space historian Roger Launius says, 'Even before the end of the Apollo program, NASA had an approved, follow-on program — the space shuttle — and a firm schedule for getting it completed.' These days, no one knows what NASA will be doing next. Meanwhile, private companies are moving forward with their efforts, raising the possibility of astronauts for hire. NASA administrator and former astronaut Charlie Bolden talked about that prospect earlier this year, saying it would be a different approach for NASA to rent not just the space vehicle, but also a private crew of astronauts to go with it. 'When we talk about going to distant places like Mars, the moon, [or] an asteroid, we will not be able to take someone off the street, train them for a few weeks and expect them to go off and do the types of missions we will demand of them,' said Bolden."
I thought most/all US astronauts were experienced Air Force/Navy pilots? Don't they already have jobs?
bomb the us up set someone
Space exploration today is not nearly important as securing votes. There once was a time when industrial might, military might, and technological advancement were yardsticks of a successful nation-state. Granted, much of those things arose from international pissing contests, and the government motivation was more geopolitical than anthropic during the early Apollo times, but there just isn't the political incentive to prop up NASA like there used to be. It is most definately a shame. Hopefully private sector takes over and makes great improvements for the longevity of our race, but I have a feeling it will be less for science and more for McLunar Nuggets.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
There has already been a Max Q
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
Sorry, but do you think throwing in a reference to programming would earn you some points here? The shuttle program has been wildly successful. While many will be quick to point to the program's 2 best-known (and spectacular) failures, the shuttles have been producing regular and predictable results since the early eighties. I'd say that well over a hundred successful missions in under thirty years adds up to a pretty damn good idea.
and hopefully it won't just be government astronauts who get to go. Back when the shuttle was seen as a way to reduce the cost of getting into space, and NASA launched commercial satellites, a few ordinary engineers got to go to space. Of course, Challenger changed all that. And the Launch Services Purchase Act proved that the best way to reduce the cost of launch is to cut NASA out of the picture all together. So hopefully, when the job of taking humans to space has suitably placed NASA in an oversight only role, we'll see ordinary people flying to space again to do economically valuable work. Then the market takes over and everything changes.
That said, NASA will still be flying their own astronauts. If there's any sense left in them, they'll be flying to beyond low earth orbit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
It's like being an ex-fighter pilot. If you've worked in aerospace, you've probably met plenty of former fighter pilots. They're a fun crowd, and they do OK after giving up the cockpit.
Being an astronaut hasn't been glamorous for a long time. Those guys spend far more time doing "Lunch with an Astronaut" than they do flying.
One should judge the success or failure of a program by how well it has achieved the goals it was built to achieve. By that most sensible metric, the Shuttle is a colossal failure. Not only has the Shuttle failed to reduce the cost of launch, it has also failed in its military and flight rate goals. Only someone who is too young to remember the promise of the Shuttle would ever suggest that it has been a "success", let alone wildly so.
Worse yet, Shuttle has set back the goal of a reusable launch vehicle for decades. Whenever anyone suggests that an RLV may be the best way of reducing the costs to space (an obviously true argument, imagine throwing away a 747 after every flight), skeptics need only point to the Space Shuttle.
How we know is more important than what we know.
over one hundred? In 30 years?
The goal was one launch a week. Getting 8% of the target is a "damn good"???
They'd have done better with standard rocket launches, since the much promised lower per launch cost via amortization was a complete joke.
Virgin Galactic is going to need some space-stewardesses...
with a man cave simulator.
"In German oder English I know how to count down. Und I'm learning Chinese," says Wernher von Braun.
...for adult diapers.
"I see the same old heavy client programmers who couldn't adapt to web programming."
Where did you get the idea they were different? Different languages, maybe, different platforms, but not a differnet paradigm from what I'm seeing. The current epitome of web programming is some pretty heavyweight shit. Not counting Flash. Of course, I just see what passes for AJAX and massive doses of Java at work. If only it were different.
Now, NASA does need to reconsider the direction it takes. Somehow I think launching more ore less straight up is just too difficult. How about sending things up more like planes?
Oh, wait. that's being tried. Just not by NASA.
I hate this. NASA needs to stay in the game, but it's lost the edge. And the funding.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I see the same old heavy client programmers who couldn't adapt to web programming.
This is partially true due to the fact that over the past 15 years the functionality available through the web platform has increased greatly and is approaching the level of traditional client applications. It's close, just not quite there. That said, while the web platform is usually excellent there are some mitigating factors hindering it's growth like the slow adoption and vendor lock-in. Considering the enormous improvements to the web platform there still is a substantial need for client applications even though most business applications could be implemented without it.
Security is a huge issue, a lot of shops simply don't want their applications exposed remotely, therein increasing the potential for an outside attack.
Performance is another. Until internet bandwidth reaches a point where it can support concurrency with enormous datasets and practically no latency then client applications will proliferate unabated.
Additionally, there are vast swathes of the population without broadband, or internet at all. Even if the bandwidth capacity increased and performance isn't an issue(server-side), we still need to establish a lot more very expensive infrastructure to plug people in.
Finally, there is the plain old issue of control. Many people don't wish to be beholden to hosting brokers and their ISP's since both are prone to draconian government meddling(namely traffic shaping or the enforcement of archaic IP laws).
While I agree the web platform is growing exponentially and it is very likely that overall adoption will exceed native applications in the near future, native applications aren't going away anytime soon. Additionally, since the fundamental concepts between both platforms tend to be more similar than different, a lot of native environments will and do support the stateless web where possible. IMO, eliminating the need for RAM and native processing is currently insurmountable.
While I would generally agree with what you are saying here, the Shuttle did "prove" that at least in theory a "reusable" vehicle could be built. As a **very** expensive prototype done with six test beds, the Shuttle at least met the engineering test goals of the program, and they did have over 130 different test flights working out some of the bugs in the system with two notable failures.
For an experimental vehicle, I think the Shuttle met its criteria of success, at least comparable to the X-15.... which BTW also took out some lives of some of the test pilots. When viewed from this perspective, the Shuttle program isn't all that bad.
On the other hand, why there are members of Congress that are trying to extend an experimental research vehicle a couple more flights when it has proven itself as unreliable and dangerous merely to take trash down from orbit is beyond me. This next flight of the Shuttle that is supposed to happen tomorrow (Monday) is precisely such a garbage hauler trip.
About the time that Apollo was canceled I was just beginning to try to figure out what I wanted to do when I "grew up". Until that point, I was thinking that being an astronaut. Yes, the shuttle was being developed, but that wasn't getting any press at the time. So, after graduation I was still on my original choices:
Carter and Ford had basically raped the CIA so secret agent was out. I didn't think there was any money in being a cowboy, but a friend in England suggested I could be a jockey. Fireman was out after my first ride along and I had to look into the brain pan of a kid who wasn't wearing his helmet when he decided to take his motorcycle Christmas present for a spin.
I tried being a cop for awhile.
So, after being a drill instructor, aircraft mechanic, and working in the IC industry for awhile, John Glenn goes back into space and I start thinking, "Hell, the way things are going, my fifth career could be as an astronaut!" But, nooooo, they go and cancel the shuttle and damn near kill the follow on.
So, as of about a month ago, I've bought a ranch in Idaho...
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
It's not obviously true that reusability is the best way. Reusability increases the launcher complexity and weight, hence design costs and launcher costs. You produce less launchers, so gain less from mass production. You can produce fewer launchers, but you need to pay for recovery and turnaround.
It may still turn out to be the best way, as SpaceX are trying to prove, but it isn't obvious.
So far, missiles are the best launch vehicles by far. This will remain so until we can build engines which don't require air with a specific impulse greater than 800.
The shuttle's failure comes from sticking a plane on top of a missile, that alone increased launcher size by a factor of 4 at least (for the same payload).
But the shuttle proved that a reusable launch vehicle was impractical for equipment launches. Getting things down from orbit is very expensive, so reducing costs requires that you allow anything you don't need to burn up. There's nothing so expensive that it's worth preserving through atmospheric re-entry.
The only case where that's not true is people, but we never send up enough people that a re-entry vehicle the size of the shuttle is justified.