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Russia's Unmanned Capsule Misses Space Station
mikesd81 writes "Russia's unmanned cargo ship Progress 38 missed docking with the ISS and sailed right on by it instead of docking on autopilot. A telemetry lock between the Russian-made Progress module and the space station was lost and the module flew past at a safe distance. NASA said the crew was never in danger and that the supplies are not critical and will not affect station operations. There will be no other attempts at docking today, and the orbit of the module raises questions of any other attempts again. Packed aboard the spacecraft are 1,918 pounds of propellant for the station, 110 pounds of oxygen, 220 pounds of water and 2,667 pounds of dry cargo — which includes spare parts, science equipment and other supplies."
While I agree, the benefits are "marginal" until you need them.
One advantage of the Shuttle is it is designed to be a jack-of-all-trades. It has a big cargo bay that you can fill up with stuff, including a space lab. The arm can be used to grab nearby things and put them in the cargo bay for maintenance. It allows seven astronauts to work in a shirt-sleeve environment for two weeks. It's a pretty impressive vehicle.
The "problem" is ISS can do most of the science stuff that the Shuttle did better than the Shuttle could (because it stays up longer). So as a science vehicle, it's not really that useful anymore. The Satellites you might want to maintain are outside the Shuttle's reach. While satellites like the Hubble Space Telescope are within the Shuttle's range, HST was designed to be maintained by the Shuttle and, in fact, has to do some crazy stuff to target stars while whizzing around the Earth within the Shuttle's range. So at this point, the Shuttle's only mission is to carry astronauts from Earth to ISS. This is akin to using a big honkin' four-wheel-drive SUV to pick up groceries at the corner store--sure it will work but it's kind of a wasteful way to do it.
Using the Shuttle to capture the Progress Drone could probably be done. But it's kind of silly to spend $60,000,000 to launch a Shuttle to rescue a Progress drone that probably cost $10,000,000 to launch. Just launch another Progress and be done with it.
I won't bag on the Space Shuttle--it's a great machine. But we really don't need it anymore. Let NASA get on to the next big thing (whatever that may be) and let private industry take over supplying ISS with people and supplies.
I don't know about it proving "marginal benefits."
As I see it, "marginal benefits" means what does it provide that something like a Saturn 1B couldn't. As I see it, there's a vast amount of unused capability in the Shuttle. It can repair satellites, but nobody wants to repair a satellite for the cost of a Shuttle mission. It can return vast amounts of mass to Earth (called "downmass"), but as far as I can tell, aside from the odd experiment, the only thing that ISS managers want returned is trash and that can be returned on vehicles (like the Progress, ATV and HTV) which burn up in the atmosphere. It has a bunch of flexibility in landing that really isn't that useful (landing people or downmass at an airport isn't much more useful than dropping them in the middle of the ocean, compared to the cost of a Shuttle launch).
As far as I know, there would be no ISS if it wasn't for the SS.
In other words, bad planning on the part of the ISS builders. None of the components were particularly massive. The Proton (or a Saturn 1B, Ariane 5, Titan IV, Delta IV Heavy, etc) could have launched all of the ISS components, if it weren't for the volume and dimensions of the pieces. By making the pieces large enough that only the Shuttle could lift them, then NASA insured that the ISS was beholden on the Shuttle in order to exist. This was, no doubt, part of an attempt to wring more funding for the Shuttle and protect NASA's supply chain from budget cuts. The drawback was that any delay to Shuttle flights, such as from the Columbia accident, insured that the ISS was pushed behind schedule. While if there had been other vehicles capable of servicing the ISS's construction needs, then NASA could have kept going with construction despite the loss of Columbia or even of the entire Shuttle program.
To summarize, the Shuttle became a single point of failure for the ISS and contributed considerably to the overall cost of the ISS's construction and past operation which is thought (once one includes the operation of the Shuttle past 2003) to run well over 100 billion dollars in current dollar cost. My view remains that with a smarter choice of sizing of ISS components and not using the Shuttle, NASA could have dropped the cost of the ISS to 20-30 billion dollars. in my view, we could have built 3-5 ISS for the cost of the ISS we actually built.