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:Ugh

[trout007]

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

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.

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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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: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: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: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.