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Private Space Shuttle Flights
An anonymous reader writes "It has recently been suggested that when the Space Shuttles are retired after their final flights this year, they may continue operations under the funding of private enterprise. United Space Alliance is considering a $1.5 billion per year proposal to take the fleet private. The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason. Is it safe to continue flights in private hands?"
Is the department really in good taste? I'm ambivalent about it.
Perception is the thin dividing line between reality and fiction.
Was it all that safe in government hands?
Convert them to unmanned drones. Save money by removing the life support systems.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I'm sure that with that kind of budget something better than the shuttle could be developed, at least for the uses they mentioned in TFA
Is it safe to continue flights in private hands?
Probably not while maintaining the current track record, no. But I can guarantee that many, many astronauts and potential astronauts would find the risk entirely acceptable.
If I can wave the magic wand, I would have NASA build a new Space Shuttle by learning to do it better the second time around. Of course there's arguments winged vehicles are limited and retro spam cans are safer (though water landings are dangerous, almost lost Grissom), however, there are limits to parachute size.
OK so the Shuttle has its flaws but so did the Tri-Motor. But that didn't stop engineers from building a better airplane, they nailed a useful design with the DC-3 and some of them are still in service! In the late 70s and in 80s, it was said if NASA spent more on development, the operational costs would have been lower (and perhaps could have eliminated some inherent dangers of non-stoppable boosters, foam shedding, and other scary stuff).
mfwright@batnet.com
nothing else flies except Soyuz. and won't for several years (unless you're a spook working off-budget and have a friend at Vandenberg AFB.) it's a slickly clever plan to push the danger and the responsiblity out to a contractor. it will, by necessity of course, succeed.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I'll not let my daughters to take those trips.... Good luck!
What is the purpose of re-using them? Is it purely as a space tug, or a space cargo shuttle that has self-guided re-entry, or is it something else? It seems to me that a lot of the stuff we do in orbit doesn't have to be staffed with humans for everything,....I mean, why else keep making software do new stuff?
(Yes, I want space tourism. But I kinda doubt it'll happen in my lifetime; the logistics and geopolitical issues conspire to make it bloody unlikely that governments will allow civilian space tourism....)
"Truth is what works" -- William James "It works!!" -- o-dark-AM comment
Private enterprises would never ever sacrifice security to cut costs
If they fly them as a private business with US employees, will they be subject to OSHA requirements?
To determine the airworthiness of the shuttles. Then the real question would be whether or not the FAA could possibly gather the balls to issue airworthiness and pilot certificates. It's a very interesting question. If it could be done, it might greatly speed the privatization of space.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Space travel is dangerous in general. Until private space travel takes off (no pun intended) we won't have a good set of figures to find out which is relatively safer, private space travel or public, and even then, private travel will have made it's way on the shoulders of publicly funded research into what was basically unknown until people were willing to take a chance.
I'm sure we can create a relatively useful and beneficial private space industry going with open minded entrepreneurs willing to cooperate with straightforward and intelligent government oversight. I hope that doesn't get in the way of summary's anti-business rail and the parent comment's anti-government hard-on rage he was going for.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
So what? As long as the risks are duly disclosed, people should be able to buy dangerous goods and services for themselves.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
As long as they always launch on the first days of July.
Maybe BP will consider buying it. They could send up the corporate board for special G20 reunions. No pesky protestors. Or so I've heard. ;>
I wonder what Ralph Nader would say? The Corvair has a better safety record than the Shuttle program.
The Shuttles weren't safe when they were new. Now with countless millions of miles on the odometer, they really didn't improve with age. Sure many improvements were made over the years, but the whole system was flawed from the beginning.
Put them out of their misery and get them to the museums before there is another tragedy!
Won't work. The Shuttle required a huge infrastructure, employing about 15,000 people as late as 2009. Layoffs have been underway for years. Manufacturing and repair facilities have been closed down. The parts stock has been depleted. It's over.
If I got rigth what TFA said, there is a company down there in florida, which will loose a lot (all?) revenue when the shuttle program ends. What they are proposing is to use tax money that are dedicated to development of new technology to study for 6 months if they can fly two of the four old shuttles for 1.5B/year (also tax money) for NASA. They are not proposing any savings (1.5B/2 shuttles=3B/4 shuttles) and they are not developing any new tech. The only valid point they have is the job security of their employees.
I have often wondered how much it would cost to build new shuttles? The technology is better now, cheaper, and there are plans obviously. No expert here, just a question.
good luck flying them for $1.5B/year.... averaged over the life of the program, shuttle launches cost around $2B EACH. The costs ~$500M come from taking years with 7 flights and 6 flights and subtracting the costs - i.e. it only includes variable costs.
The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years
That's a little disingenuous, while Discovery and Atlantis are from the original fleet are 27 and 26 years old respectively, Endeavour was a replacement first used in 1992 and therefore only 19 years old. Note that ALL of the current fleet have gone through significant refits. If I recall there were two refits for Discovery and Altantis and one for Endeavour.
and NASA is retiring them for good reason.
True. Nobody expected the program to go this long without a replacement. Up until the 80s and the Shuttle NASA had been fairly aggressive with new R&D. It's really easy to point fingers and assign blame, but quite frankly the hope and dream of the 60s has long been buried in bureaucratic mismanagement and budget cuts. There are a lot of people at NASA who, if given a budget and a free rein, could inspire us again.
I really feel sorry for the under 30 crowd who never got to see the Apollo missions. Personally the only one I remember is the Apollo/Soyez linkup but being a kid in the 70s you had the impression that things were happening and that the future was in spaceflight...
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
With the estate tax (aka "death tax") in place, this could be a fantastic source of funding for the gov't. Every time there's an accident and one of the billionaires on board dies, half their estate will go to the gov't and half to their heirs. NASA could use these funds to pay for the shuttle replacement program.
If the shuttle is down to the single function of servicing the space station, why not throw that 1.5 billion to build capacity/redundancy with the Russians who seem to be doing a better job cost/safety wise. Unless we're taking up another or servicing Hubble.
In the end, United Space Alliance will win as they get a cheaper "buy american" spin off, lets NASA go on to bigger and better programs, and saves the embarrassment of having Russia having the sole ability to service the ISS.
While I doubt USA (the company not the country) has a lot of options, this reeks of desperation. The Shuttle has huge flaws and liabilities that don't go away merely because you transition its operation to private hands.
1) There are only three Shuttles (one which has been mothballed). Lose one and it's the end of the program. Who would develop a $1 billion probe that could only be launched on the Shuttle, knowing that there's a double digit chance that the Shuttle ends through accident by the time the project is ready to launch?
2) Even as $1.5 billion a year, that's $750 million per launch. For payload, that's $20k per kg. Everything else that the US has is much cheaper than that per kg and per launch, even the Delta IV Heavy.
3) There's no reason to expect the Shuttle to achieve this cost goal. NASA manned launch contracts typically are low balled by a factor of two or more. Given that the current cost of the Shuttle is $3 billion per year and the bid cost is $1.5 billion, I think it likely that we'd see little in the way of cost savings.
4) You have to restart significant portions of the Shuttle assembly line. The external tank (ET) and Space Shuttle main engines (SSME) manufacture have been completely shut down, for example. They'd have to rehire a bunch of people.
5) There's little need for the Shuttle and its capabilities. The biggest feature, "downmass" (or moving stuff from the ISS to the ground) can be covered with the ATV, HTV, or Dragon. And after the Shuttle ends you have some part of $3 billion per year freed up to perfect these other approaches.
In summary, while the USA proposal crosses one of the key Shuttle privatization hurdles (actually finding someone to do it), it still doesn't make sense.
In honor of those lives lost in 86 [...] the fleet should have been grounded a LONG time ago
I'm pretty sure that none of the people whose lives were lost would consider it an honor for the fleet to be grounded. Pilots, researchers, and anyone else who undertakes to get onto a giant chemical rocket pointed up accepts that there's some risk, and they accept it willingly. This isn't a job at McDonalds that people take because they have no other choice, this is a job that highly skilled and motivated people take, despite (relative to what many of them could be doing in private industry) crappy pay, shitty hours, and lots of hard work. Not to mention that all told space travel under NASA has been exceedingly safe, being a commercial pilot would, in fact, likely be riskier to life and limb, it's just that when things go wrong with space flight in it's current state they go *wrong*.
and millions starving instead of being fed to do so [...] NASA is a pig, a money pit, we all know it
NASA is such a tiny portion of the federal budget that the idea of calling it a money hog is laughable. No one is starving because of the shuttle program, and the basic research NASA has produced has, in fact, helped farming methods, food safety standards, food packaging and shipping technology, food processing technology... etc. Not to mention that your argument is a false dichotomy, the only two things the govt spends money are not NASA and food...
Hell, if we'd funded NASA better we'd probably have a shuttle replacement flying by now.
it is already private with FAT government spending and waste
Uh, what?
"goodbye and hello, as always" ~Prince Corwin, from Zelazny's Amber series
Tell that to the farmers who will have burning debris falling from the sky.
OK! I will! Tell us exactly which farmers were burned?!
And I'll also tell that to all the little children who have been burned and molested by, not only the astronauts but by all the the aliens brought back by the shuttle! And let's not forget all the other made up tragedies that you've pulled out of your ass ...
Oh, Let's not forget the space shuttles that have flown up your ass causing you such horrrrriiiiible harm! Boo hoo! You're a victim of anal space shuttle launches!
Only a couple of shuttles blew up due to poor maintenance while they were publicly run; how much worse can it be when the maintenance budget is managed by someone trying to actually make a profit?
NASA's budget is a fraction of the size of many other programs that are funded by the government; claiming that it is the reason people are hungry and poor is disingenuous at best. The Shuttle was a stepping stone; a "proof of concept" if you will. It was designed for boosting things into relatively low orbits around the Earth, and did fairly well at that task. It was also useful for establishing a long-term habitat in orbit - another stepping stone to bigger and better things. Cancelling the entire program "in honor of lives lost" would not have honored those lives. Their lives were lost in the pursuit of something bigger, something greater. Turning away from that challenge to bemoan fate and pick at navel lint "in their honor" would seem a poor way to remember them.
The Shuttle fleet WAS grounded a long time ago. The program was very nearly killed a few times, as Congress and the news media looked for places to lay blame for a tragedy. It was grounded, but eventually allowed to start back up when new safety precautions and tests were put in place. You don't improve by quitting after a failure, you improve by picking yourself back up and learning from what went wrong.
Is there waste, graft and corruption in NASA? Possibly. Okay, probably. I challenge you to find any organization of that size where no such thing exists. Heck, there aren't many organizations of ANY size that can claim to have perfect report cards. Deep pockets though? Hardly. If they were deep, they wouldn't worry about shutting down the Cassini-Huygens, Voyager or Hubble programs due to lack of funds. The machines still work, but you have to pay for the people, equipment and electricity to keep the programs running here on Earth.
Billions? Billions gets you one aircraft carrier or one B-2 bomber.
In the grand scheme of things, Billions isn't such a big deal really.
Wiping out NASA won't magically balance the budget or allow us to afford every entitlement you can think up.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I take it you don't consider space exploration important. Despite what you think, space exploration should be something near the top of everyone's list to worry about.
Why? A multitude of reasons, firstly the perpetuation of the species. If we can live in space and/or on another planet, say Mars. In the event of a major widespread illness or natural disaster, there would be enough people living on another planet to survive. The second reason is population, with 7 billion people on the planet it is getting pretty full, we need new places to expand. Thirdly, natural resources, we can probably find lots of much needed natural resources on the other planets in the solar system.
Being able to have space stations in orbit or other places in the solar system would allow for the safe R&D of dangerous technologies, for example if research on infectious disease could be done on a space ship or space station, in the event of an accident they wouldn't risk the entire planet.
Plus space exploration has a major trickle down effect on a lot of other industries. For example long range (like to go to mars) space ships are going to need efficient long term power generation, food production and high speed communications, compact life support systems, all that technology can be applied to other areas here on earth. Not to mention all the jobs it can create since people need to design and build that stuff.
All those rockets NASA burned up during the Mercury program to get a working launch vehicle that could send an object into orbit paved the way for all the satellite systems we now enjoy.
As for the people that died in 1986, while tragic and completely avoidable, we have to realize some people are going to die pioneering this frontier. Sure NASA has been caught twice now (Challenger and Columbia) taking some safety for granted but that is a fixable problem. If you think they should have stopped in 86 because of the loss of the Challenger, they should have stopped after the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts. But it didn't stop them, they figured out what went wrong and made to design changes to prevent it happening again. And with Challenger while being negligent in authorizing the launch, afterwards they did redesign the O-ring system to better prevent the issue from happening.
Why does NASA not build new shuttles of the old design? The material and the actual building cost must be only a fraction of the original development cost.
It can't be because of it being an "old outdated design" or "unsafe" as they have been using them all this time. And with the 20 years of lessons and experience gained there must be some minor changes that will improve them.
Yeah sure, a newly designed shuttle/rocket/whatever probably would probably meet today's needs better. But a newly built old space shuttle is still better then nothing at all
And it surely must have been many times cheaper than the Constellation program mess.
You feel sleepy. Close your eyes. The opinions stated above are yours. You cannot imagine why you ever felt otherwise.
There is no way a private company could keep the shuttles flying and make any sort of profit.
Even when they were brand-new, the shuttles needed an insane amount of work to service them after each flight. According to Henry Spencer, in postings on sci.space, it took a "standing army" of NASA employees months of work to prep a shuttle for the next launch. The main engines need to be pulled and overhauled, tiles need to be inspected and damaged tiles replaced, and I don't even remember all the details.
I remember he said it takes a million signatures to launch a shuttle. As in: work gets done, someone runs down a checklist and makes sure everything is good, and someone signs off that the work is complete. That, times a million.
As others have noted here, the payload capacity of the shuttle is rather large, which isn't actually that useful most of the time. On the other hand, the shuttle can only reach a low orbit, which is also not ideal. So basically a shuttle flight can lift a stupidly large payload to low orbit, then it needs man-centuries of maintenance before it can do it again.
Adding spice and excitement is the chance the shuttle will be destroyed during the mission. (The people on board might or might not die: historically each shuttle lost has killed everyone, but one of the exciting failure modes would be for the landing gear to fail and the shuttle skid to a stop, never to fly again.) Henry Spencer estimated that the shuttle is only 99% likely to avoid being destroyed, which is terrible odds. (I believe he made that estimate after Challenger and before Columbia.) The shuttle has had 132 missions and two catastrophes; I have no reason to think it has gotten safer since then. (Yes, lessons have been learned and applied, so I shouldn't expect the exact same catastrophes again. But what other catastrophes might happen with an aging space shuttle?) Also according to Henry Spencer, if two tires on any single landing gear arm blow out during landing, that would total the shuttle (probably without hurting any astronauts). That has never happened, but one tire blowing out has, more than once.
As many have said for many years, what we really need is a "space pickup truck". There are times you want a giant moving van, but much of the time you are better off with the smaller capacity pickup truck.
What we really need is a launch vehicle that can take a small payload (one single ton would be plenty for many useful purposes) into orbit, then land, be minimally serviced, and then do it again tomorrow. You could ferry people and supplies up and down quickly and easily. You could have one or even several on stand-by to launch in case of some sort of emergency. You could send large things up in modules, and connect the modules once in orbit.
The ideal reusable vehicle would be a "single stage to orbit" (SSTO) design. You want your space pickup truck to have as low a total cost of operations as possible, so having pieces fall off it during launch is a complication you want to avoid.
If you must, do a two-stage to orbit. Some serious proposals have called for two manned vehicles, docked, with one lifting the other part-way up and then a pilot flying it back down while the other vehicle goes the rest of the way to orbit.
I believe that, when we get our "space pickup truck", it will have been developed by private industry. Armadillo Aerospace, SpaceX, XCOR, and various others are trying various things, and after enough generations of prototypes, somebody will get an affordable system for moving things and people in and out of space.
Many things become possible once you have cheap and reliable access to space. For example, if you want to send people to Mars, you would do well to ship fuel, oxygen, and other supplies up in a bunch of little cheap flights, rather than trying to do the Apollo thing of having a complete and self-contained system launch from Earth.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Every illustration, poster, image, of a "space station" produced from 1975 to 2007 showed a docked shuttle. Usually it was some "expanded" version of the ISS, and there was always a shuttle in those images, docked.
I propose we keep one in space. Send it up unmanned, remotely piloted (or send up a single pilot, who's return flight will be provided by the Russians), and keep it docked to the ISS.
This way, the ISS has an "emergency boat" or escape craft if something goes extremely wrong. Furthermore, as Apollo 13 showed us, it's good to have an extra "lifeboat" that the crew could evacuate to if there's a problem aboard the ISS that can't easily be fixed.
It could be both an escape pod and an extra shelter. We know that seven people can fit on the shuttle's living quarters and you can bet the folks up there would appreciate the extra space.
Plus is has it's own O2 scrubbers, fuel cells, and could even be used as a tug to boost the ISS into a better orbit someday. Why throw it away? That makes no sense if we've already got people up there.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
That's right.
It's dangerous out there.
Mankind is just still in the infancy of space travel. Getting from ground level to low earth orbit is not a ride to the corner supermarket in your momma's Camry.
Heck, even just getting up to the edge of space (not orbit) and safely back down to Earth like Rutan's Space Ship One did is fraught with peril.
The best we can do yet is to make calculated and managed risks with the space technology we have yet developed. And those risks are orders of magnitude greater than the risks of everyday terrestrial travel, or even travel via commercial or private aircraft thru the skies.
Still, I would take the risk and go into space in a heartbeat, if I were offered a chance and somebody else was footing the bill.
Even in a tired, old, commercially operated retired Space Shuttle.
Heck, I'd even do it in a Russian spacecraft.
NASA's budget is a fraction of the size of many other programs that are funded by the government; claiming that it is the reason people are hungry and poor is disingenuous at best. The Shuttle was a stepping stone; a "proof of concept" if you will. It was designed for boosting things into relatively low orbits around the Earth, and did fairly well at that task. It was also useful for establishing a long-term habitat in orbit - another stepping stone to bigger and better things. Cancelling the entire program "in honor of lives lost" would not have honored those lives. Their lives were lost in the pursuit of something bigger, something greater. Turning away from that challenge to bemoan fate and pick at navel lint "in their honor" would seem a poor way to remember them.
The Shuttle fleet WAS grounded a long time ago. The program was very nearly killed a few times, as Congress and the news media looked for places to lay blame for a tragedy. It was grounded, but eventually allowed to start back up when new safety precautions and tests were put in place. You don't improve by quitting after a failure, you improve by picking yourself back up and learning from what went wrong.
Is there waste, graft and corruption in NASA? Possibly. Okay, probably. I challenge you to find any organization of that size where no such thing exists. Heck, there aren't many organizations of ANY size that can claim to have perfect report cards. Deep pockets though? Hardly. If they were deep, they wouldn't worry about shutting down the Cassini-Huygens, Voyager or Hubble programs due to lack of funds. The machines still work, but you have to pay for the people, equipment and electricity to keep the programs running here on Earth.
I think Mr AC's sentiment is pretty much what I was thinking of posting, so here it is.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason.
What would that good reason be? Just because they share the same name and basic design as something that started flying 30 years ago? The design *has* evolved, you realize, right? There *have* been updates.
The Russians are still flying Soyuz. It is a design that's closing in on 50 years old. Should they stop flying it just because it's an old design, despite the fact that it is the most reliable manned space system?
The Boeing 747 was designed in the 1960 and first flew in 1970. A standard 747 airframe is expected to do about 20,000 takeoff-landing cycles and last 25-30 years of daily service. Many of the currently flying airframes were built in the 1980s. Should we junk the entire fleet, too?
The Mars Rovers have lasted well, well beyond their mission lifetimes (about twenty times longer, in fact). Should they have been shut down after 90 Martian days just because they would have been old at that point?
Just because something isn't new and shiny does not automatically mean that it is no longer fit for its designed purpose. It also does not automatically mean that nothing has been done to improve the design.
That said, there are some good reasons that the Shuttle program needs to be shut down now, primary among them being that the program has been in process of retirement for a long time and it would not be possible to reverse that process to continue the program without excessive expenditure. My wholly uneducated speculation is that the proposed $1.5B per year is a gross underestimate because I have yet to see any large project that isn't off by an order of magnitude in the initial numbers. But suggesting by innuendo that the fleet needs to be retired just because it is old is broaching on sophomoric.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
who would be the crew and who would be mission support? i doubt many of the government employees would decide to leave government employ and miss out on their future pension checks.
also, who would be liable in case of an accident? would it be nasa's fault for giving them "faulty equipment"? or could the company even be held liable in the case of an accident in space?
If the Phoenicians where as scared as the US public is of making a dangerous voyage they would have been forgotten. We can't make the most complicated machine ever built, built by the lowest bidder as safe as a minivan. Then again, if you consider accident risk per mile, the auto industry has a high standard to match. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Houston, we found a creationist here.
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
In Soviet Russia the space mission aborts you!
Wikipedia indicates that the incremental cost-per-flight is $60M per flight, and assumes that the three remaining shuttles remain operable. (With a regrettable and perhaps inevitable tendency to become inoperative ... suddenly.) The original disaster potential was estimated during shuttle development at one every 75 missions.
I say park 'em, and admire the program for the amazing ride that it has been. (Expensive, incredible, dangerous, exhilarating, and more - regardless of whether you are pro or con.)
My nickle going forward is on Scaled Composites and Sir Richard.
You can sail to other parts of this planet where all of the above holds true, you can meet other people, find stuff, all while floating on a dead tree, that grew by itself.
Space? It's utterly hostile to human (all) life, empty, and immediately lethal. You need to rely on the most advanced technology humanity can muster just to go to the bathroom and breathe.
For what? There's nothing up there, and it costs a lot just to get there. Manned spaceflight is a stunt, nothing more. It's a playground for the rich, bragging rights for the bored.
In ten years, you and I are still going to be down here, where there's everything. Space won't change a single damn thing to anyone's life.
Those 30 year old aircraft are torn down completely after every single flight and completely rebuilt after checking every part on them in excruciating detail.
There is no other vehicle in the history of our species that has traveled more miles per accident than the shuttle fleet.
They aren't some ragged out old Boeing 737 flying out of Madagascar that hasn't been serviced in 15 years and was deemed unsafe for flights in the US.
They aren't unsafe, we just don't care as much anymore and a much larger selection of other countries who can launch orbital payloads reduces the need for us to continue the program.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Say before ten flights, then the government will panic and shut private spaceflight down for good. If is after several dozen flights, then they'll be a temporary suspension, study, and re-engineering.
My nickle going forward is on Scaled Composites and Sir Richard.
You seem to be forgetting that the composite "two-stage" craft they're building are not orbit-capable. They can merely (and just barely) go mostly straight up to get to the edge of space, and then they fall back into the atmosphere. They are not capable of reaching the speed necessary to get to orbit. They'd disintegrate long before reaching a fraction of orbit entry velocity, let alone be able to survive a de-orbit re-entry.
If we didn't have the 6000 dollar space toilet seats we'd probably have a better funded program. NASA is a money sink, pig, whatever you want to call it. For sure it is not effective of efficient.
This thread has nothing to do with creationism, or the like. Does have to do with fundamental business sense, and the lack that NASA exhibits.
Shameless self promotion: On the 25th anniversary of the disaster, I wrote about Challenger's final mission, how continuing pushing science education can honor the crew's memory..
That said, I had the opportunity to attend a lecture by Dr. Story Musgrave a couple of years back. He basically sold me on the idea that we need to shelve manned space flight at least for the time being.
The argument in a nutshell is this:
He's one of the most experienced astronauts alive today. He's certainly not anti-manned spaceflight, But he makes a very good point. We're spinning our wheels now. We should continue only when we have a real direction for manned spaceflight. Until then, the science can continue on the robotic side.
Touch everywhere, even when inappropriate.
The shuttle is a fundamentally compromised design stuffed with 40-year-old technology.
Any sane private company would use something completely different..
Look at what United Launch Aliance and SpaceX propose to do.
"The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason..."
NASA is retiring them for no reason other than a lack of money.
They were designed to fly 100 missions each, I'm not sure if they've even passed 25 each yet.
"Don't be a martyr -- BE THE ONE WHO GOT AWAY!"
is going to pay $750 million PER FLIGHT for a private shuttle launch (and it will never be that cheap), when they can wait a few more years and pay maybe $100 million to SpaceX or Boeing or even United Space Alliance for a rocket launch in a new, much safer capsule.
This is all about cost. An analogy would be continuing to use a mainframe with a $1M/year support contract to do your accounting, when a $5k off the shelf server could do it just as well.
Necron69
USA and/or its ancestors have been running the shuttle program for over 20 years now. Except for the controllers themselves (and there a lot of former controllers inside USA), pretty much everyone works for USA. NASA works with them to plan the missions but USA executes and maintains.
That's not true because the problems that brought down those two shuttles have been fixed. There's no way to really know what the odds are now. They might be less because there are fewer issues that can cause a failure now, or they might be more because the shuttles are aging.
No, not really. Political correctness, squeamishness and cost issues, perhaps. Would have crewed on one 20 years ago, would crew on one 5 years from now. Catastrophic failure was meticulously factored in from the very first mission, and STS far outperformed early catastrophic failure predictions. It's space-flight, not commercial aviation. The program design remains as valid as it ever was (not always bleeding-edge, given the design and testing cycles), and every inch and every system of each orbiter is exhaustively inspected and repaired as needed after every mission, and again before each mission. Would the overall system be designed differently today compared to the considerations and compromises made in the early '70's, of course. Would the original airframes have remained viable for the 55 years (and counting) service life of the B-52, we won't know. Did the current orbiters themselves and the overall program need to be retired at this particular point in time, not by flight worthiness standards if accepting the original risk factors.
The question to ask is whether STS was sacrificed to allow funds to be diverted to other programs and commitments, and whether that was a fully informed, objective, and correct decision for the country. Perhaps it was, perhaps not.
Whether United Space Alliance could successfully convert this program to private sector is certainly intriguing, given the significant infrastructure the program required and which has now largely been dismantled.
I saw this news clip at msnbc.com over a week before of all places. Why is this getting posted today (and not earlier) from usa today? Did msnbc actually score the news ahead of the major newspaper? Can that be real!
I'd go tomorrow......
Who cares? As long as NASA gets some pretty hardcore, iron-clad, liability waivers I think its a great idea.
"Have you tried restarting your Space Shuttle?"
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Billions also gets you weeks in the sand pit, how much more productively that money is being spent!
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
1. Loyds of London wont even consider covering a tadpols accidental death policy on any of the Shuttles.
2. Barak-O is hell bound to destroy the US Space Program, and all the jobs.
-308
If I ever work for a private spaceship company, and they use illegal parts, software, music, or sunglasses, I will be sure and turn them in to the United Space Alliance for my reward.
This will never happen due to massive cost a Shuttle needs for operation. A private company will pursue financial profit and the Shuttle is anything but financially profitable. It would have been if the initial projection of 60 flights/year were a reality, but that never happened and never will. Ad this to decaying infrastructure (no more ET being build) and personnel layoffs. If the remaining Shuttle mission will be successful, their place should be in museums. They've done their job, bringing Man into orbit and building the ISS. Don't push their luck, a Shuttle is a very, very fragile system and only very skilled men a huge amount of luck made it possible to fly so many missions with only two total failures. As for the plans for a new shuttle, it's futile as long as we don't have a clear destination for it. The STS program was intended for LEO, not GEO, not Moon flyby, no Mars landing. We've been to LEO, we already have a huge space station there, let's go further. Makes no sense to have a shuttle fly astronauts to asteroids or Mars. Don't get me wrong, I love the Shuttle. It's a brilliant flying machine and she did a really good job. But it's time for a new vehicle.
Though NASA, just a few years after Challenger, did lose sight of what the Shuttle was (apparently / in practice) about - provoking ignorant Soviet generals to push for "counterpart" allowing them to match (nonexistent) "strategic advantage" of STS... probably contributing to the bankruptcy of USSR.
It didn't really deliver on any of its points as advertised - so why was it allowed to suck NASA dry for two decades after the above was met? (oh, right, after USSR had the decency to recognize its bankruptcy, the whole other superpower went on a spending spree...) Sure, in a twist of fate Buran was undergoing final preparations pretty close to post-Challenger Return to Flight. But already then the signs could be seen, already then it was a prime time to think about replacement...
They didn't even really learn from organizational errors, largely repeating them with Columbia...
One that hath name thou can not otter
While expanding our species will certainly prove handy, eventually - I wouldn't count on any mass exodus, emigration, as a solution to any local problems (of population density, for example)
;> Also, you can't really improve the speed of communication, just bandwidth at most. Early NASA efforts didn't lead to all satellite systems around. And it can be argued that the Shuttle stalled our efforts at the grand vision...
You get born on one planet, you will almost certainly die on it, that's it. Even now, the bulk of colonists can be miniaturized and in deep hibernation
Don't you mean "research on infective weapons" BTW?
One that hath name thou can not otter
You do not understand the joke hehe...
Dear, Not everything in life is "strictly business " or are obliged to "make money".
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
I would prefer to see development of a next gen vehicle. Maybe a man rated X-37B, or take another run at the Venture Star.
The Shuttles are cool, but they are really complex. A smaller vehicle with the mission of ferrying men to space, with a complement of unmanned ships moving cargo is probably the solution we will go with.
It is better to be the hammer than the anvil.
I read about this in a Craiglist post ages ago. (Seriously, the "Best of Craigslist" list is hilarious, but some language is NSFW).
Of all the US manned spacecraft there ave been 3 that killed their crew: Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia.
Given that a shuttle crew is about twice that of an Apollo crew, and there were two lost shuttles to one lost Apollo capsule, the shuttles is the vehicle responsible for 4/5 of the deaths in the US space program.
I understand the difference between lobbing a capsule 100km into the air and orbital flight.
My point is that a company or group of technical individuals, such as Scaled Composites, would be able to better design and operate a craft (using 20-20 hindsight and lessons learned) with $1.5 billion than keeping the original Shuttles going.
It will go with my Concorde....
Well, just for starters:
Placing the crew compartment/Shuttle craft along side the solid rocket boosters and LOX/LH2 tank is a big mistake. The crew is more vulnerable to catastrophic failures of these devices. (No Apollo-style or Soyuz-style escape system is possible with this type of configuration). Also, not being the leading portion of the whole assembly (rockets, shuttle, & tanks) during a launch, the Shuttle craft is vulnerable to strikes from debris falling from the leading surfaces. (This is the reason that the ice strike that doomed the Shuttle Columbia happened.)
Then there's the vertical stabilizer and wings that are vulnerable to damage (especially on reentry) and require elaborate protection schemes. Unfortunately, these "appendages" are critical for controlled reentry and landing.
I don't think commercials want to use shuttles after those crashes. One more thing: Shuttles are in a poor condition after years of flights
wonder if they require a pre flight physical??? Do we get those groove flight suits??? Wonder if they play the theme to "The right stuff" as you are boarding?
Joe Investor
ISS is a synergy, not only a continuation of Alpha project (which was indeed planned in a way to give Shuttle a purpose...and it can be argued that the Shuttle stalled some grander things...), also of modules which were for some time in the making / were supposed to form Mir 2. And about those plans and direction... (almost a bit too bad they lost the Moon Race, I can almost see them maintaining small lunar base for some time now)
Thing is, the future probably can't be done via a crazy crash project in the style of Apollo. ISS does help us along the way
One that hath name thou can not otter
Oh don't go too far with specifics; it isn't a very good LEO booster at all, it wastes most of the launched mass on airframe. Part of the orbital habitat in question was simply designed to require Shuttle. And first grounding perhaps was a wasted opportunity...
One that hath name thou can not otter