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."

Comments

Right...

[Ironchew]

the supplies are not critical

In other words, it had everything worth living for in it. You don't *need* tasty food or new videos to survive.

Re:Right...

[Firehed]

No, not technically. But international data rates to the space station are a bitch. /only half-joking

It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[mollog]

Is there no vehicle for the people on the space station to use so that they can nip out and catch the errant missile? Jeepers, that would have been the first thing that I would deliver. Surely, they had anticipated this happening and considered what to do about it.

It's not clear to me why we're doing this whole space station thing in such a half-assed manner. Why not think in terms of a permanent space station, and all that entails?

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[Cylix]

Actually,

Everything is going completely as planned.

There were no supplies on the vessel and the pod was purposely sent off course. This was a very thoroughly planned tactical decision in order to acquire the funds for the supplies via the insurance payoff.

We would have gotten away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids and their dog!

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[jdigriz]

The space tug was one of the first things that was cancelled in the space station program http://www.astronautix.com/craft/otv.htm We're doing this whole space station thing in such a half-assed manner because approximately half of the people in Congress would dearly like to see the entire thing cancelled (and this is not a vote along party lines). They try at every chance to kill the thing outright but it's always so far been saved at the last moment (with subtantial cuts) in a political compromise. And the thing about a compromise is that it's a solution that no one is happy with, ie, half-assed. That's the main reason. The other reason is that the station is in LEO, and thus is subject to significant atmospheric drag via the attenuated atmostphere. It's not a permanent orbit. Within a few years at most, without periodic reboosts (which cost fuel), the station would reenter the atmosphere and burn up. The primary reason that the station is in such a low orbit relates to the quality of the launchers we had to launch it. Without a Saturn V class, we had no real capability to project more mass than a telecom satellite to a significantly higher orbit. The Clarke orbit is filled with junk from dead comsats, so it's unsuitable for permanent habitation even if we could reach it with so much mass. And the area between LEO and GEO is mostly unreachable by the supply and personnel rockets we had with significant payload. So basically, the reason this station program is so half-assed can be laid at the feet of the people who killed the Saturn V. Skylab was launched in 1 launch. The ISS took dozens to be mostly complete.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[socz]

So what happens when the space shuttles are all retired and we only have apollo-era capsules that we can send up with a breath-taking-fall-back-to-earth? Not dissing you, but the U.S. really bit the bag on this one. The shuttles are one of the best assets the U.S. has. Literally, no one else on earth has *anything* close to it. What a shame.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[Kilrah_il]

Although the space program had (has) it's share of fuck-ups, I would be hesitant to jump up and yell aloud: "Everyone is stupid, I just had a great idea no one else thought of before". I mean, what you say sounds reasonable, but if hundreds of scientist didn't provide for some sort of space tug, they probably had some reason, other than plain stupidity. Some possible reasons I can think of from the top of my head (at 3:00AM; disclaimer - IANAS*):
1) The frequency of such missed dockings is too low to justify the cost.
2) It is cheaper to send another probe than to have a space tug ready at all times - Remember that mass is money in space, and also you have maintenance to consider.
3) The technology for the space tug is not safe enough - it could be unpleasant if one of the astronauts gets marooned on the space tug.
Please don't try to refute the above points. I am not saying this are the reasons, those were just examples.

You may be right and nobody thought about some sort of contingency plan for such a scenario, but I would check it before marching around and talking about "half-assed manner".

* IANAS - I am not a scientist.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[R3d M3rcury]

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.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[h4rr4r]

Trey Parker and Matt Stone were both born in the USA.

Skylab was a lab in space before the space shuttle. Salyut 1 was before that, but it had two missions that both failed. Soyuz 10 that could not board due to fire and Soyuz 11 that crew died on rentry do to a lab. Shuttles are pointless ISS could have been lifted by cheaper and safer rockets.

You seem to be wrong on all accounts.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[dangitman]

Ah, but then you'd need a space-tug-tug to pull your space-tug back when it fails...

Yo Dawg, I heard you liked space tugs...

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[khallow]

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.

Re:It's time to deliver a space tug to the station

[NNKK]

I keep hearing nonsense like this, and it's really stupid. You're stuck in a Cold War mentality (which was absurd even during the Cold War).

Who the hell cares if there's no Shuttle replacement ready? Manned space exploration is about science, and there is no scientific need so urgent as to justify the continuation of the 30-year-old disaster that is the Space Shuttle.

SpaceX will be up to speed in a few years. Boeing and/or Lockheed Martin can man-rate a rocket and capsule in a similar amount of time if needed.

There is absolutely no reason to continue the massively overpriced and unnecessarily dangerous shuttle program just to prevent a 2-5 year gap in manned exploration.

With our current three-Shuttle fleet, you could only reasonably expect to run 4-6 missions a year at most anyway, and I promise you that the termination of the program would not come when the new vehicle is ready, but when you are suddenly left with *two* Shuttles and seven fewer astronauts.

Re:Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

[NNKK]

It's called being prepared. The ISS is kept well-stocked and the loss of a single resupply run is expensive but not operationally critical.

Vger

[PPH]

In a few thousand years, a craft from some distant advanced civilization will arrive in our solar system loaded with their interpretation of Russian porn.

Progress?

[The Grim Reefer2]

This is what passes for "Progress" in space these days?

Re:Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

[h4rr4r]

Not as much as the milk, holly is going to have to put those poor bastards on the dog's milk now.

Re:Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

[CheshireCatCO]

Lasts longer than any other milk, dog's milk.

Re:Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why?

No bugger'll drink it.

Re:Can't believe they still use pounds

[sznupi]

Kilogram is a unit of mass...

Re:Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Oxygen fuel and water aren't critical?

The fuck?

Meaning they still have plenty.

Re:Can't believe they still use pounds

[sznupi]

Not nearly so as you think it to be. 1000 kg is a mass of 1000 liters of water; that's a cube 1 meter on its side. Meter is derived from the size of the Earth (ancient Greeks could do it).

Yes, those are no longer definitions; but they give something very close from, as far as humanity is currently concerned, readily accesible (by unsophisticated means) constants around us.

Re:Can't believe they still use pounds

[h4rr4r]

Human feet vary far more than the mass of water in a given location.

Re:Can't believe they still use pounds

[Sir_Lewk]

What the fuck are you talking about? Pounds is debatable but kilograms always means mass. Things have mass in space.

If you are smart enough to think that you know the difference between mass and weight, then you sure as shit should be smart enough to know that kilograms is a measure of mass.