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Space Shuttles Discovery and Atlantis Meet One Last Time
longacre writes "One dull morning last week, two teams of NASA technicians simultaneously gathered at two iconic buildings — the 525-foot Vehicle Assembly Building and the shorter, but equally important Orbital Processing Facility 1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, tasked with moving a space shuttle orbiter from one building to the other. The 'shuttle shuffle' would have Space Shuttle Discovery (the oldest and most flown orbiter surviving in the three-ship fleet) in OPF-1 swapping places with her sister ship, Atlantis, the second oldest and second most flown orbiter. Fleet leader Discovery would emerge from OPF-1 as a preserved spacecraft, gutted and mummified for museum display."
The two of them, together finally !!
So... Which one will be the Ark?
Goodbye, and thank you for the fish.
I hate it when museums do this kind of thing to aircraft (or in this case spacecraft). Nothing is more uninteresting than a hollow shell body. Once the problematic liquids are drained there is no reason they can't leave the engines in place. The parts that make things like this interesting are all the mechanical components and displays that make up the actual vehicle. Every time I see this done to an aircraft, I can't help but think of how much of an utterly boring display it makes. They might as well erect a cardboard cutout equivalent, it's nauseating.
No, but a sister shuttle was always kept on ready as a backup to be sent up if the other shuttle needed to be rescued.
a sister shuttle was always kept on ready as a backup to be sent up if the other shuttle needed to be rescued.
Only after the Columbia disaster. Prior to that, no.
Only since Columbia, and only because we've grown so weak that we as a nation have become afraid of our own shadows that we only accept a 0% risk in any endeavor now. That's why China, Russia, and India will beat us back to the moon and beat us to Mars by decades.
We just threw away our only viable spacecraft, and now pay Russia to haul personnel to the ISS.What is the point in participating in ISS any more, if we're cutting NASA's budget to the bone? We just eliminated the only (publicly-acknowledged) viable solution for servicing satellites or for safely returning large loads from ISS. No one else has/had that tech before, and now nobody does. What a waste.
Plus one more thing I'll mention: gutting the shuttles is tremendously stupid. Think of future generations who would love to look at the engine, avionics, and other systems decades or centuries in the future; it would be like purposely burning books, leaving only the covers intact for future generations to see. Why bother putting the fuselage on display at all? It's a damned shame. There are only three shuttles in exsistence - they should keep them intact. Tear them down and decontaminate them to remove all traces of Hydrazine if you must mothball them, but for goodness sake keep them intact for future historians and archeologists!
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
...the shuttles *really* hate that.
And only when they weren't docking at the ISS. Basically if they were headed to the station, and something went wrong and they couldn't hook up, sending another shuttle up wasn't going to help. One time in recent memory that they had two shuttles sitting on the launchpad, was when one was going to service the Hubble. So in this instance, they had a backup, as they would not be docking with the ISS. Looked it up to find a picture, and found this article with a little more info. Two shuttles were only every visible on launch pads at the same time 4 times. And there was only ever 2 shuttles on launch pads (but not both visible at the same time) 18 times in history. http://www.space.com/6597-rare-sight-twin-shuttles-launch-pad-time.html
I'm watching the "From Earth to the Moon" series right now, and t made me pretty sad to see the one shuttle with its guts all removed, and the other moving in to share the same fate. I wonder if the U.S. will ever have a manned space program again. If NASA is like a lot of other government agencies, there is a large percentage of the workforce that is getting ready to retire and without a program to enable hiring younger people, I imagine that manned U.S. space flight will be done.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
Only since Columbia, and only because we've grown so weak that we as a nation have become afraid of our own shadows that we only accept a 0% risk in any endeavor now. That's why China, Russia, and India will beat us back to the moon and beat us to Mars by decades.
The shuttle wasn't retired because the US is too risk-averse - there were plenty of other good reasons:
In the meantime, no other nation has come anywhere close to the US's success in planetary exploration, including some potentially risky missions (Mars rovers, for example) which so far have had a relatively good failure rate and zero deaths. If China beats us to Mars by decades it won't be because the US is too risk-averse, but because their government can get away with spending a large fraction of their GDP on a propaganda exercise, and we're currently crippled by a colossal national debt and a democratically accountable government. I would be utterly shocked if Russia or India were to make it there at all, certainly not before the US does.
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far.
Yes, the shuttles hate that.
Tesla was a genius. Edison however was a overrated hack who liked to torture puppies.
Ships and aircraft are commonly reffered to as 'she'. It's a long standing tradition. Don't get your panties in a wad.
If/when civilization collapses, we're going to need examples of past technology. Everything from the butter churn on up. What if you were trying to recreate a movie projector and found that only the casing was preserved, with no internal workings? I understand the health issue for the public, but they should mothball one of those intact.
One function of museums is to be a repository of knowledge, art, and technology, for future generations. It's not the only function, but I would argue that it's the most important function. It's not just a display that you look at for entertainment.
Cory Doctorow has a book, Makers, from 2009 (available for DRM free download http://craphound.com/makers/download/ ) that talks about distributed open source museum spaces. Three years later the Smithsonian announces they're going to offer a part of the collection for worldwide printing.>
That's great. It will serve the surface educational mission of museums. Multimedia exhibition. But if you're at a post sea-rise far inland Argentinian coast trying to figure out how to make a steam engine, how are you going to make use of a rotting polymer copy?
Nothing. They're MACHINES people! They're JUST machines....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
We just threw away our only viable spacecraft
Guess we'll have to get SpaceX's Dragon working then. Too bad that SLS money won't help a bit.
Not entirely accurate, but close.
I think they definitely succeeded in the first part--making orbital travel routine. The inexpensive part, they didn't succeed but the method they were using to make it inexpensive was more of an accounting trick than some sort of new technology. The idea was to block people from using anything except the Shuttle to put things into orbit. The idea was that the Shuttle is going to go up anyway, so you load it up with a bunch of paying customers' satellites and they end up paying for the launch.
Well, that depends. Through the 80s and 90s, it was mostly used as a launchable space station, keeping a crew of 7 alive in a shirt-sleeve environment doing research. The problem is that the Shuttle could only stay up for a few weeks--experiments that needed longer were out-of-luck. Of course, the solution was a space station but NASA didn't have the money to build one. That said, once the ISS was online, the Shuttle did become a very inefficient tool for delivering people to the ISS.
That depends. Lots of interesting research happens on ISS. The problem is that it's all boring sciency stuff--it isn't exploring the great unknown out there. As an aside, I'm seeing the "No Bucks, No Buck Rogers" POV here--it's just that Buck has been replaced by a robot. Go take pictures of rocks on Titan? Hell yeah! Actually try to figure out the differences between the rocks on Titan and Earth and why those differences exist? Snoooooooze. I'd rather see pictures of the rocks on Triton!
Now you're conflicting with your first point: "it was a complete failure with regard to its original purpose, making orbital travel routine and inexpensive." It wasn't supposed to go anywhere interesting.
This one, I agree with wholeheartedly and that was the best reason to end the Shuttle program.
As I mentioned above, the ISS was basically the nail in the Shuttle's coffin. The whole raison d'etre for the Shuttle was to do experiments in space. Now we have ISS for that. So the Shuttle is just a really expensive way to get some people up to the ISS--the equivalent of driving your huge gas guzzling SUV to the corner grocery store to pick up a coke. I wholeheartedly agree with NASA shutting it down. Personally, I don't even think they should waste time building a rocket to get them back there--give that task to some contractor and promise that, if successful, they'll pay for x flights. There are various companies already working in that direction--let them ferry scientists up to the ISS. Personally, I'd consider moving ISS management over to the National Science Foundation or some other group and get it completely out of NASA, but that might be going a bit far.
In more ways than one.
Give it time, someone will argue it.
You may want to look up some of the shuttle history. Carrying out experiments in space was not the original idea. That was what the space station was for.
The original concept was a smaller vehicle, intended to move people and small cargo back and forth between a permanent manned space station. It was truly intended as a *shuttle*. It was intended for frequent launches; hence the interest in a reusable vehicle. Heavier payloads were intended for conventional rocket designs (some kind of Saturn evolution).
But then funding was cut. Getting a new heavy lift booster, a space station, *and* a shuttle was not going to happen.
At the same time, the Air Force got involved. The AF needs the ability to launch spy satellites in to polar orbits. By working together, the thought was that STS could be kept alive. But polar orbits are harder to reach, and spy satellites are big and heavy. That meant a much larger vehicle. So the shuttle design evolved into what it is today.
But then the Air Force realized that the compromise design was lousy, and decided to stick with conventional rockets. SLC-6 was never used.
As a result, NASA was stuck with something of a white elephant. The shuttle was trying to be too many things at once. It wasn't the small, cheap "bus" that was originally conceived, but it also wasn't a cost-effective heavy launcher.
It's a shame; some really brilliant technology and engineering went into the program. But when the design goals are conflicting and ever-changing, no amount of engineering skill can compensate.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's only a Google search away:
http://rule34-data-001.paheal.net/_images/e87437d84ebd02ab3c9e8a8e5ef817f9/289857%20-%20Blackrose%20Boeing_747%20NASA%20Space_Shuttle%20airplane%20inanimate.jpg
http://rule34-data-000.paheal.net/_images/4fb0a62354c27b6e69d1a2bdf5a15e43/191603%20-%20NASA%20Space_Shuttle%20Space_Transportation_System%20featured_image.jpg
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far.
Yes, the shuttles hate that.
Did they at least put the eyes in the right place?
http://jalopnik.com/5870976/how-pixar-screwed-up-cartoon-cars-for-a-generation-of-kids
Lots of interesting research happens on ISS. The problem is that it's all boring sciency stuff
Actually, I work in one of the fields that was studied on the ISS (protein crystallography), and being familiar with the results that came out of there, I can attest to the spectacular inefficiency of that endeavor too. I don't have the expertise to comment on any of the other experiments, but the fact that protein crystallization research was a major justification for building the ISS is a red flag. I love boring science-y stuff, but when playing with other people's money it behooves us to spend it as efficiently as possible, not just buy a lot of cool toys with it.
We just eliminated the only (publicly-acknowledged) viable solution for servicing satellites or for safely returning large loads from ISS. No one else has/had that tech before, and now nobody does. What a waste.
Plus one more thing I'll mention: gutting the shuttles is tremendously stupid. Think of future generations who would love to look at the engine, avionics, and other systems decades or centuries in the future; it would be like purposely burning books, leaving only the covers intact for future generations to see. Why bother putting the fuselage on display at all? It's a damned shame. There are only three shuttles in exsistence - they should keep them intact. Tear them down and decontaminate them to remove all traces of Hydrazine if you must mothball them, but for goodness sake keep them intact for future historians and archeologists!
Gutting museum ships is standard practice for various reasons. 1 of them is safety. Leaving many of them would be a long term fire or chemical hazard. 2. It simplified long-term maintenance which is not a trivial detail for museum exhibits. Another thing is that most of the parts removed would not be visible to musuem goers anyway unless the entire ship was cut up. Given that there's no way to make these craft flyable anway, making an issue of this is really stirring a tempest in a teapot. Also many of the shuttle components are being taken out because NASA is going to USE them... which is what they were made for anyway. With the exception of the Hubble Space telescope and satellites of similar size, using the shuttle to service them would cost more than just replacing the damm satellite in the first place. It never was a practical way of servicing them, more a test bed of techniques.
We just threw away our only viable spacecraft
Guess we'll have to get SpaceX's Dragon working then. Too bad that SLS money won't help a bit.
We didn't throw away "our only viable spacecraft" We shut down and put the mercy killing to an absolute failure of a manned system that wasn't ever going to deliver on it's promise on cheap and frequent access to Earth Orbit. Keeping it around because it's the only system we have is not a good enough reason to throw good money after bad.