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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?"
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
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"
...and boosted to orbit as a payload of expendable launcher (with Russian main engine, to boot)
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Payload to orbit of STS is in the range of quite a few other launchers. Nothing "nice" about system which ends up more expensive than them, and wastes ~90 tons of mass to LEO on airframe.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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
Ah yes, the "private enterprise does things better than the government" meme. It is unfounded, of course, but sounds really good. This time, it's being applied to 30 year old space vehicles built for the government then operated and maintained by them (two of which suffered catastrophic failure, BTW). By some magical force (the Invisible Hand, perhaps), private enterprise will not only make them work better than ever before with a truly spartan budget, but with wealthy civilian passengers onboard!
1) Propose some bullshit idea to privatize a government function
2) Shut eyes really tight and repeat some capitalistic mumbo jumbo (any one will do)
3) ???
4) Profit!
Just imagine what Scaled Composites would be able to do with $1.5 billion!
I was thinking of Ariane, those $1.5 billion would buy twenty flights, each sending twenty tons to low-earth orbit.
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
In the Shuttle's defense, I must say it has much better acceleration and a much higher top speed than the Corvair. Oh, and it flies too!
The fundamental flaw in the Shuttle design was putting the booster tanks beside the Shuttle instead of below it. It's successors won't make the same mistake.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
The SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle and Dragon spacecraft have already conducted successful orbital and reentry operations and will be performing resupply missions to the ISS this year. As you mentioned, there's also the Soyuz for crew exchange missions until the Dragon is man-rated, and both the European Space Agency and Japanese Space Agency will be operating unmanned resupply operations, in addition to the Russian Prospekt missions. The reality is that we're not suffering from any gap between our space transport needs and available capabilities, attempts to convince the American public otherwise are simply transparent cash-grabs by the military industrial complex (Boeing, Lockmart, and the other contractors that make most of their money building things that go boom), supported by Republican congressmen in love with pork.
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
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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.
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