Another Leak Delays Final Discovery Launch

vsolepr writes "Today's scheduled launch was scrubbed because of a gaseous hydrogen leak near the spacecraft's external tank. This is the fourth time in the past week that Discovery's launch was delayed due to various leaks and electrical issues. NASA now is aiming for a launch date no earlier than Nov. 30."

Comments

Another Leak???

[thewils]

Blasted WikiLeaks!!!

Re:Another Leak???

[jeffmeden]

Is it sad that this was my first thought, too? It seems that there is nothing we can't blame on WikiLeaks...

Re:Another Leak???

[Sulphur]

Is it sad that this was my first thought, too? It seems that there is nothing we can't blame on WikiLeaks...

Gates, Jobs, Ellison...

Enough Leaks Already

[WrongSizeGlass]

That shuttle leaks more than:
* Most diapers
* FireFox memory
* [insert government agency name here]
* A guy with an enlarged prostate

Re:Ugh

[trout007]

It's the 2010 External tank that is leaking not the 1970's Orbiter.

Re:Ugh

[qmaqdk]

About $1.3 billion per launch, counting total program cost divided by number of launches. Good news is an extra flight will lower the costs per flight to a bargain $1.288 billion.

Re:Ugh

[harrytuttle777]

I would rather waste money on this than some of the other crazy things that the government wastes money on. Have you ever seen a shuttle launch. It lights up the sky from 90 miles away. It is kind of impressive what humans kind can do when they are not fighting against each other.

Another Columbia?

[adosch]

I think I'd be shaking in my boots if I was a Discovery bound astronaut. Although, I think it's a good thing their exhaustive checkout is finding more issues, it's a real drag to see NASA struggling to get one last launch of the Discovery and having such showstopper flaws. I understand that no amount of engineering or preparation can substitute the small amount of pure luck it is to have a successful space launch with all things considered, but you can't help but wonder if there wasn't such drastic funding cutbacks for NASA in space exploration and aeronautics if we'd be seeing a different, more positive outcome from the same reporting.

Re:Ugh

[fishbowl]

More important than the abstract idea of what it costs to launch the shuttle, is "who gets the money?" and "for what?"

I have a feeling that if we actually *had* to put a shuttle up, and managed to keep things like corporate profits, individual compensation, and natural resource market costs out of the equation, it would be a lot less.

Re:Ugh

[PacketShaper]

well fuck me

Pass...

Silly assumption

[Quadraginta]

It always puzzles me why folks imagine saying a given piece of tech is old is axiomatically equivalent to saying it's been mightily improved upon since then.

Has the pencil been improved on yet? How about the wheel? Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s? Do we still use propellors to make boats move? Et cetera.

I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea. After all, the biggest advances since the 70s have mostly been in stuff like electronics or avionics, and besides the fact that this doesn't do squat for things like thermal protection and reliability of very high energy rocket systems under very heavy load (the two weaknesses that killed Columbia and Challenger, respectively) the best of these advances in electronics have in many cases been retrofitted into the Shuttle anyway.

Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.

Re:Silly assumption

[Osgeld]

Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.

maybe cause NASA has not done much of anything in these feilds since then?

and its not the technology of getting it done, yes we still burn gas in our cars, no I do not drive a 1979 buick with a leaky fuel tank

Re:Silly assumption

[Darinbob]

If it came with an iPhone dock, then it'd be modern.

Re:Silly assumption

[sznupi]

Unless something was not the best idea in the first place, and even worse implementation (did the Shuttle deliver on any of its main points, as advertised?)

60s, 70s...its designers probably raised on scifi with a whole lot of spaceplanes - no doubt influenced by huge airplane advances in the 40s. Which differed quite a lot from those 130 year old depiction of "our" times (/. & links with unicode...), apparently influenced by rapid advances in (sub?)marine technology. We can build them (take a Harrier, remove wings and canopy), but it doesn't make those past dreams a good idea. Not a lot flying boats around nowadays, too.

Re:Silly assumption

[Raenex]

Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s?

Do we drive cars from the 1880s? Or do we continuously improve on them?

Re:Silly assumption

[bertok]

Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.

That's a very valid point, most people don't realize that there never will be any "magic" improvements in rocketry to bring the cost down to the point that we'll all be taking holidays on Mars. It's still a high-energy problem, and new technology doesn't necessarily make the hard problems much easier.

There have been improvements though, they're just not that big or visible. For example, computer-aided design would allow a new rocket to be extensively modeled without expensive testing. Multiple design and testing iterations could be performed without ever stepping into a machine shop. This in turn allows design simplifications, a reduction in part counts, etc...

Computer-aided machining has made enormous improvements since the seventies, in part complexity, cost, precision, and the type of materials that can be used. Old designs would not have assumed the availability of CAM, so they might rely on manual steps, such as welding and riveting. To use parts made automatically by machines, a design optimized for that manufacturing process is required.

There have been significant materials-science advancements, which is why both Boeing and Airbus are now creating aircraft made of composites, which wasn't practical or cost-effective in the 70s. Of course, some of these advancements have made it into the shuttle, for example the Super Leightweight Tank is made of a high-tech aluminium-lithium alloy. That's an easy part to replace, but upgrading the orbiter would be essentially a redesign, so it has remained relatively unchanged.

The real problem with the shuttle is that the fundamental concept is flawed. It assumes that people are needed in orbit -- robots do a better job now, thanks to advancements in digital electronics. In turn, the original design also assumed that it's worth reusing the container for those people. If there are no people, nothing needs to be reused. The engines might be worth bringing back down, but a small ablative heat-shield and a parachute is more than enough for that, there's no need to build a huge heat-shielded structure with wings and avionics! When it costs $thousands per kg of material sent into orbit, anything not directly serving the purpose at hand is just waste. The orbiter weighs 68,585 kg empty, of which only 9,531 kg is the engines! Not counting the structure required to protect the payload, the remaining 50 tons of shuttle structure is just a huge waste of money. That 50 tons could be payload on every launch. Over the 100+ launches that have occurred, that's 5000 tons of satellites or space probes that could have been launched. A large satellite is 5 tons, so that's over a thousand that could have gone up, but didn't. Just imagine: if only 10% of those were for solar system exploration, we could have had a hundred or more additional space probes out there among the planets!

Re:Silly assumption

[0123456]

That's a very valid point, most people don't realize that there never will be any "magic" improvements in rocketry to bring the cost down to the point that we'll all be taking holidays on Mars. It's still a high-energy problem, and new technology doesn't necessarily make the hard problems much easier.

The ultimate limit on the cost of getting into orbit is the cost of rocket fuel, which is not a lot. What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.

If there are no people, nothing needs to be reused.

So we should build single-use container ships and sink them after they've crossed the ocean once?

Reusability is _the_ biggest cost-saver possible, so long as it doesn't require the massive maintenance that a shuttle does between flights (not to mention the cost and complexity of the external tank and boosters).

Re:Silly assumption

[bertok]

That's a very valid point, most people don't realize that there never will be any "magic" improvements in rocketry to bring the cost down to the point that we'll all be taking holidays on Mars. It's still a high-energy problem, and new technology doesn't necessarily make the hard problems much easier.

The ultimate limit on the cost of getting into orbit is the cost of rocket fuel, which is not a lot. What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.

If there are no people, nothing needs to be reused.

So we should build single-use container ships and sink them after they've crossed the ocean once?

Reusability is _the_ biggest cost-saver possible, so long as it doesn't require the massive maintenance that a shuttle does between flights (not to mention the cost and complexity of the external tank and boosters).

You can't re-use the rocket fuel, and it makes up the bulk of all rockets, by both mass and volume. It is also necessarily much heavier than the payload. (think: rocket equation)

In contrast, a container ship is mostly metal, with only a small fuel fraction, and a high payload fraction.

The cost computations wildly are different, by several orders of magnitude.

None of this will change, ever, with chemical rockets for fundamental reasons. We'd need to invent entirely different propulsion systems (nuclear, fusion, etc...) before we can start designing rockets like container ships!

Your kind of logic created the shuttle, the least cost effective of all commonly used space launch system in use today.

Returning to my original point about the shuttle, I did mention that re-using the engines might be worthwhile. They're usually complex pieces of turbomachinery made from high-tech alloys. In contrast, the bulk of most rockets is basically just a tube with some internal struts for strength. Compared to the total cost of a typical launch (including payload), the cost of a metal tube is irrelevant.

Re:Silly assumption

[Jeremi]

What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.

Balancing yourself on a giant tower of explosively combusting gas is never going to be particularly safe; hence the high maintenance costs to quadruple-ensure everything is "just right", before committing to what could very easily become a human fireworks display.

What's really needed is a reliable way to get high volumes of material into orbit -- one that doesn't require fuel to be present in the vehicle (other than possibly as payload). The problem with putting fuel in the vehicle is that it adds to the weight of the vehicle, which means you have to add more fuel to help lift the fuel you've already added, and so on, until the snowball effect limits the size and capacity of your vehicle to "not very much".

Once that's solved, and we can get significant amounts of material out of this nasty gravity well inexpensively, the rest is cake. Until then, it's doubtful that any rocket design, no matter how advanced, can do much -- it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.

Re:Silly assumption

[strack]

well actully, the high maintainence costs of the shuttle were due to everything *needing* to be quadruple checked because there wasnt a effective crew escape system, like you had on the saturn rockets. and the engines that were machined to such fine tolerances that they needed to be pretty much pulled apart and inspected for cracks after every mission. and the enormous shuttle heat shield, with tens of thousands of tiles that had to be individually inspected.

Re:Silly assumption

[ultranova]

Has the pencil been improved on yet?

Yes. Modern mechanical pencils are a huge improvement over the original.

How about the wheel?

Yes. Spoked wheels are an improvement over the original round disk, as is making the metal parts out of aluminum. Magnetic levitation trains might also count.

Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s?

Care to compare modern cars to 1880s ones in any metric and tell me there's not been improvement? And let us not forget Wankel engines, fuel cells, etc.

Do we still use propellors to make boats move?

Yes, we do. Of course, modern propellors are not only more efficient than old ones, but are also often mounted so they can be turned, to help steering.

Et cetera.

Yup, pretty much.

I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea.

To put it bluntly: aerodynamics, material science, and chemistry have all moved on. So have flow dynamics and the ability simulate various scenarios. As a result, to suggest that a modern replacement of the Space Shuttle wouldn't be an improvement over the current one is simply idiotic.

Re:Ugh

[jd]

HOTOL might have been more cost-effective. The Russian space shuttle almost certainly would have been. The problem with the space shuttle was that false economies were made. Sometimes to save money you have to spend it. The shuttle was under-sized, under-powered and was forced to have dangerous piecemeal boosters for political reasons. By spending the money up-front, you'd have a cheaper, safer, more reliable shuttle which would doubtless still be in production, not scrapped.

It'll be interesting to see how first-stage alternatives go. One option is to use turbine-assisted ramjets, another is to use a ski-jump-assisted ramjet. These would replace some, but not all, of the current first rocket stage. The idea is the same in both cases - provided you can break 400 mph, the ramjet is capable of self-sustained acceleration. Break the sound barrier and it becomes a highly efficient device. Hydrogen-powered ramjets are good up to about mach 6. Not great, sure, but not bad either. Since the weight should be about 1/5th that required by a rocket to reach the same speed, that's a lot more payload you can suddenly carry. Ideally, you'd use a mix of a ramjet and a scramjet to completely replace the first rocket stage, again reducing weight and increasing the payload you can push into orbit.

Re:Ugh

[volcan0]

You are aware that the space race was a fight against other humans, to be the first to achieve it right ?

To be expected

[Darinbob]

Even I start to leak more as I get older.

I know just the man for the job

[superdana]

Levar Burton has offered his assistance to NASA:
http://twitter.com/levarburton/status/541379696533505

Re:Ugh

[Raenex]

Have you ever seen a shuttle launch. It lights up the sky from 90 miles away. It is kind of impressive what humans kind can do when they are not fighting against each other.

Have you ever seen a nuke go off? That lights up the sky impressively too.

Re:Ugh

[harrytuttle777]

Absolutely. But there is a world of difference between competing in a noble competition to be the first in space, vs the competition for wealth and power that is unconstrained by any sort of moral compass.

I am all for competition, but thing there should be some like drawn between just and unjust competition. Competing by creating a better product is good. Competing by creating a patent pool and suing anyone that makes a better product is unacceptable and cowardly.

Yes, I am way too idealistic.

-Obedience to the rule of law is obedience to the rule of tyrants.

Re:Ugh

[sznupi]

Energia would be probably nice, yes, in launches without Buran (but still probably not very cost effective due to scale and rarity of the launches). HOTOL was apparently dropped when it became clear that a rocket using the same technological advances would be at least equally effective (but much less complex). And you would want to up the size of the Shuttle?

An orbital launcher flies most of its mission outside the atmosphere. Most of its mass is reaction mass. That, together with what the rocket equation is, probably means a pure rocket will be able, for a long time, to better use technological advances necessary to make a true spaceplane even barely possible.

But perhaps such advances are not even the best way, perhaps simple mass-production would be better. We had a test run, with the first widely used rocket; too bad the orbital effort in such style was killed.

This is Suprising?

[Stormy Dragon]

This was the last external tank made at Michoud. As it rolled down the assembly line, everyone who worked on it did their particular task and then was laid off as soon as they were done.

And people are shocked it's not particularly well made? Frankly, I think the astronauts taking this tank into orbit have to be nuts.

Re:This is Suprising?

[tftp]

Frankly, I think the astronauts taking this tank into orbit have to be nuts.

Right you are. That's why they will not take the tank to the orbit. It separates at T + 8 minutes 50 seconds, which is about 69 miles.

This is why they're being retired.

[AJWM]

The vehicles are getting too old to fly, despite the overhauls they get after every mission. Even the disposable parts (like the tank) because of attrition in the skilled workforce that built them.

Not that we haven't known this was coming for longer than it took to go from a standing start to men walking on the Moon, but too many managers have been more concerned with protecting their turf than ensuring continued manned access to space.

Re:Ugh

[THE anonymus coward]

At least this time... earlier it was a hydrazine leak.

Re:Ugh

[0123456]

I'm not in disagreement with you, but I still am really interested in knowing how much of the "cost" of launching a shuttle is amortized into the space program's sunk costs, how much is in the market value of natural resources, how much is in salaries and real estate expenses and stuff, and how much is marginal costs...

It's a few years since I looked into this, but I believe at the time the variable cost of a shuttle flight was around $250,000,000 and the fixed costs of the program were over $3,000,000,000 a year. A lot of those fixed costs go into maintaining KSC and other NASA facilities; imagine how much an airline ticket would cost if you flew a mere six times a year and did so from your own multi-runway international airport with a staff of thousands.

Re:food for thought

[0123456]

They have no real motivation to do a good job because they could do a catastrophically bad job and they still wouldn't get fired.

I'd hate to work where you do if the only motivation you people have to do a good job is the fear of being fired.

But that's not really the problem anyway: the real problem is not that the 'crucial employees' start doing a bad job, but that once they realise they're going to be out of a job in two years the 'crucial employees' are the first ones out the door because they can easily get a new job elsewhere.

Re:Ugh

[Jeremi]

So, how much is this costing us to duct tape this 1970's clunker back together for 1 last hoo-ra and for what scientific gain?

Average cost of a Shuttle Launch: $450,000,000.
Population of the United States: 307,006,550

Therefore, it's costing us an average of $1.47 per person.

Of course it could be better - just look at it

[dbIII]

Just take one look at the thing. Great big rockets strapped onto the SIDE. That was the highly undesirable outcome of having to meet a variety of constraints that were not there when the original plans were made. They could have built a far better shuttle for specific tasks in the 1970s, but the compromises produced what we have. It shows how amazing the NASA guys are that it managed to work at all.
The main factors that made it like this were a requirement to be able to get into orbits that require a lot of fuel if you are going from Florida and the problems associated with making the thing taller than it is to have enough fuel to get into those orbits. I don't know how many missions it was used for that actually needed that, they were apparently classified military missions but it's not as if you can hide the thing up there so some astronomers would known how many times it went into polar orbits. I can't say if the compromise was worth it and the seven lives lost due to a chain that started with the compromise, only somebody that knows the worth of the polar orbit missions and if they really had to be manned anyway could say.
A shuttle designed to get to equatorial orbits would look very different and have better lifting capacity than rockets that have to handle great bit weights strapped to the side and the extra mass required to make it strong enough to do so.
Personally I think it was wasted sometimes on "space truck" missions that didn't need to be manned in the first place and could just have been done with a larger conventional rocket than our current satellite launchers, but every mission probably did something useful since there's a few crew working on things even if the primary goal is just to deliver stuff.

A disturbing divide in society

[dbIII]

Here we have yet another example of the Eloi hate of the greasy Moorlocks that actually do stuff other than lounge around in a garden waiting to be eaten. Have you considered that the workers in question would actually be proud of their work and watch the launch with the joy of seeing the results of a job well done?

Re:A disturbing divide in society

[Ga_101]

Taking pride on one's work died round about the time that job security and pay that wasn't "How low can we get away with?" did.

Re:Ugh

[strack]

project orion wasnt really a good idea. what you really need is something more like NERVA for the upper stage, or some sort of nuclear reactor powered ion engine. like a scaled up VASIMR for in space travel.

Re:Ugh

[quacking duck]

One estimate in 2007 put the cost of the Iraq war as high as $720M a day. Watching cockroaches mate in zero gravity, or "bringing democracy" to a region that isn't culturally ready for it and is costing thousands of lives on top of that... I know what I'd cut first.

(Yes I know focus has shifted to Afghanistan and doesn't cost as much money, the point remains)

Re:food for thought

[dgatwood]

I'd hate to work where you do if the only motivation you people have to do a good job is the fear of being fired.

It's more than that. If you've ever seen a company where people are forced to train their replacements, you'd know what I'm talking about. If you know that you're about to lose your job, there's a definite sense that what you do must not be important, or else you would still be doing it.