What on Earth (or in space) are you on about? Progress has a payload of less than 2.5 tonnes, and has no reentry vehicle. The Soyuz capsule has a cargo down-mass of 100kg in addition to the three crew. There's no pure cargo version of the Soyuz re-entry capsule, but the total down-mass looks like around 400kg including crew. The Soyuz (R7-based) launcher can lift over 7 tonnes to LEO. Is that what you are getting confused with?
By comparison, Dragon cargo capsule has a carrying capacity of 4.2 tonnes (3.3 tonnes to ISS), and can return 2.5 tonnes to Earth. F9 launcher can lift around 13 tonnes to LEO.
Cygnus can carry about 2 tonnes, but has no return vehicle. (Though, like Progress (and the Dragon trunk) it can burn up waste.) The Antares launcher can lift around 5 tonnes to LEO.
The ATV can carry about 7 tonnes to ISS. But also has no return vehicle. It also has systems to automatically transfer fuel, water, oxygen to the ISS storage tanks; and fully automated docking systems. The Ariane 5 launcher can put 21 tonnes into LEO.
"It's like a reusable bottle costs more to make than a disposable one." However, SpaceX's reusable launcher is their expendable launcher. It's the same hardware. Essentially, they are just looking at how many times they can reuse their "disposable bottle".
The Shuttle has poisoned the idea of reusability, but the Shuttle was never really suited to be reusable. Every system pushed the state-of-the-art to its limit - engines, heat-shield, tank, boosters - rather than taking what was then known (Saturn II, Saturn V, etc) and saying, "Can we save money by recovering/reusing a first-stage/capsule?" and then spending a decade gradually working outwards from that.
"You have to take the whole thing apart and rebuild everything". The system has been designed for the engines to be quickly removed and swapped out. (For example, they've removed engines, fixed valves, restored everything and re-prepped for launch within a day. IIRC, they've swapped out an engine on a vehicle at the Cape in 5 hours.)
Once they regularly recover stages, the recovered engines will all go into an engine-pool, where they will be tested individually; nine working engines will be fitted to a first stage and test fired together. Then the full rocket is assembled, raised onto the launch-pad and test fired again the day before launch. But the thing is...
"and you have to make everything stronger to take repeated use." But the thing is... they do the same thing with new engines anyway! Every engine is test fired at least three times between manufacture and launch. It's how they are designed. So it's not an extra "reusability" procedure, an extra cost, it's what they already do; and, according to Musk, it's not only a small part of SpaceX's launch cost, it's one of the reasons their costs are so low. So if you have already designed them for multiple-uses, it's pretty unlikely they'll work exactly four times and then suddenly stop. (Apparently they've test fired the engines dozens of times. So the only issue is whether there's additional wear/damage during actual flight that shortens the life. And recovering a few first stages would be a great way to have a look, yes?)
Next time you are in a supermarket, have a look at their handset/recharge/charge-card display. Chances are they have dozens of "pre-paid starter kits" for every carrier (and reseller) in your area. These contain just a SIM card, no handset.
Even with carrier-locked handsets, you can normally use any new SIM kit from that carrier. More importantly, you can buy almost any brand of handset unlocked from the manufacturer, and hence run any SIM kit from nearly any carrier. This is particularly useful for travellers who want to avoid the hideous "international roaming" charges from their own carrier.
Carrier-approval is only required for subsidised phones sold through their own branded outlets. And my guess is that the Fortune500 companies buying these crypto-phones for their senior people are going to buy them outright, unlocked, not wait for carrier-subsidised versions to come out.
While many like to blame the USAF for this, there were no "USAF requirements". It was NASA who wanted to bring USAF into the shuttle development, believing it would increase funding. It backfired on them.
But the problem with the shuttle wasn't just scope-creep, it was the fact that they threw away everything they'd done up to that point (both Apollo/Gemini/Mercury and the USAF's X-plane program) and tried to develop a 100 ton to LEO space plane in a single step. No precursors, no incremental development. Specifically ignoring the very process that they used for Apollo development. There weren't even unmanned test launches before they flew humans in 1981. All in the false belief that it would somehow save money.
The whole design process was broken.
And they repeated the same stupidity with VentureStar, where even the sub-scale demonstrator required a dozen brand new technologies (one of which wasn't successfully developed until a decade after X-33 had been cancelled.) As did the USAF with NASP. Trying to jump ten steps in one. Trying to shoe-horn every new idea into a single program, in a single step.
Obama [...] wanted to speed up Commercial Crew (also from W's time
Minor quibble, only COTS (cargo) was from W's time. While CC was advocated by O'Keefe as part of his "Spiral" proposal, it wasn't actually started until Obama/Bolden in 2010.
[Spiral was actually a good plan; COTS, CC, commercial stations, fuel depots, modular BEO ships, etc. Even W's VSE was okay, if enabled through Spiral. Then Griffin killed any hope of progress by dragging in his own Ares plans from LM and making them the centrepiece of VSE. And we've lost a decade so far due.]
No. Bad design, bad development program and non-existent development path, bad operations, etc. It was astonishing that they got such monstrosities to fly at all (let alone for over 20 years), but they were not "magnificent".
They were more like the Spruce Goose, or Concord, or Russian K-7, or Caproni Ca60, or other ridiculous aircraft.
GPS was designed by and for the US military during the Cold War. If it isn't designed to work without Russian ground stations, someone should probably be shot.
Antares also uses Russian engines (NK-33), so if GPS satellites are deemed military by Russia, Antares will lose access to Russian engines if it agrees to launch them.
Only Delta IV and F9 & FH seem untouchable for US launches.
Not necessarily. It will just score Aerojet $5b in emergency USAF funding to copy the RD-180 engines. And, hmmm, what can we cut to help pay for it... oh, this "commercial crew" isn't necessary compared to Issues Of National Security Importance, so let's just kill that. Hey it's a crisis, we've all got to make sacrifices. Plus another $3b "Guaranteed Access Payment" for Boeing for more Delta cores. Oh, and special legislation to ban lawsuits over National Security Payload contracts.
You're suggesting they'll be sensible and actually do something to ensure launches for USAF/etc payloads. I'm saying that history says they'll use any crisis to fuck over their rivals and reward their friends, regardless of the actual cost to the country.
If "suicidal pilot" was the most insane of the theories being thrown around (and intensely and angrily believed by so many people), we wouldn't be having most of these arguments.
If you believe a short burst of toxic smoke filled the cabin and killed the crew without the same fire causing enough damage to kill everyone else
Although there have been fires that have killed the pilots but left passengers alive, that's not what I said, nor is it any kind of requirement of the "fire scenario". I'm not sure where you got that idea from.
Aside: If you think the passengers would have tried to communicate/get-help if the plane was damaged, then you should also believe the passengers would have tried to communicate if the plane was hijacked. Making the various hijacking theories even more unlikely. (And certainly, post-9/11, no-one just sits there and obeys hijackers anymore.)
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics
That's not what was said. Learn to read.
First step when the pilots identify an electrical fire is to pull the breakers. (If it works, you reintroduce them one at a time until you isolate the fault.)
Second step is to turn towards a suitable landing site. The closest runway had an approach over mountains, so the pilots seem to have turned to an airport with a more open approach, then changed course again a little later (suggesting the issue had become more serious), they may also have increased altitude to try to starve the fire. That seems to be their last intentional manoeuvre.
There may have been a depressurisation during the climb (caused by the fire), pilot error, or some other screw up. Most accidents have a primary cause, but a bunch of other stuff going wrong. AF-447 was initially caused by a faulty air-speed sensor, but ultimately a series of mistakes by the pilots killed the plane.
there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours
MH-370 had only just taken off. Pilots who've discussed this are thinking nose wheel-well fire filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The question is why the pilots didn't use their own oxygen supply. (They might have delayed turning on the main cabin oxygen, fearing feeding the fire (a la SAA 295), but why delay using their own supply?) Bad decision by the pilots, or flaw in the 777?
I think you're conflating the satellite pings [...] and the ultrasonic "pings" that the submerged flight data recorder
Chinese and Australian searchers picked up possible sonar pings from the FDR beacon. But were unable to confirm the findings enough before the beacon died.
In any case, the simplest answer is to have planes transmit a GPS fix a couple times per hour to a satellite communication network. The cost would be negligible compared to the overall operation cost of the airplane.
Yeah. It stuns me that they don't have position pings once every fifteen minutes (plus twice more on heading, speed and altitude changes.) It would revolutionise aircraft S&R.
Hell, why don't large aircraft transmit position, heading, airspeed, altitude, etc continuously to their home organisations? The bandwidth required is trivial, a few kb/s would be more than enough even for things like fuel/climb-rate/turn-rate/cabin-pressure/alarms/etc. The satellites needed have existed for decades.
The rest of the explanation is that the crew were overcome by smoke/fumes. (They're supposed to have independent (bottled) oxygen supply, but it's happened before.) The aircraft flew on autopilot on the last entered heading until it ran out of fuel. (Which has also happened before.)
Why didn't they call a mayday earlier? The rule of thumb for pilots is: Aviation/Navigation/Communication. First you get control of the aircraft, understand what is happening. Then you work out your position/course and heading (actual and intended). Then, and only then, do you worry about telling anyone about it. If they were caught between "Navigation" and "Communication", that would explain their actions and their silence.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!" But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
don't look at me - I didn't set permissions [...] The receptionist got to have a long chat with the Sr. Partner spearheading the project about the use of the company PCs.
I would suggest the Sr. Partner was (like TFS and GP) blaming the wrong person. If your receptionist can delete your billing system, you are doing computers wrong and should probably just give up the whole technology thing.
We see the same attitude when companies threaten/injunct/sue academics who discuss technical flaws in security systems. As if showing that the security is lame caused the security to be lame.
but I don't think they should go about it through taking advantage of overreaching executive order.
They didn't. SpaceX requested an injunction to freeze USAF contracting more launches to ULA. They didn't request an injunction on engine purchases from Russia.
Slashdot Mirror
What on Earth (or in space) are you on about? Progress has a payload of less than 2.5 tonnes, and has no reentry vehicle. The Soyuz capsule has a cargo down-mass of 100kg in addition to the three crew. There's no pure cargo version of the Soyuz re-entry capsule, but the total down-mass looks like around 400kg including crew. The Soyuz (R7-based) launcher can lift over 7 tonnes to LEO. Is that what you are getting confused with?
By comparison, Dragon cargo capsule has a carrying capacity of 4.2 tonnes (3.3 tonnes to ISS), and can return 2.5 tonnes to Earth. F9 launcher can lift around 13 tonnes to LEO.
Cygnus can carry about 2 tonnes, but has no return vehicle. (Though, like Progress (and the Dragon trunk) it can burn up waste.) The Antares launcher can lift around 5 tonnes to LEO.
The ATV can carry about 7 tonnes to ISS. But also has no return vehicle. It also has systems to automatically transfer fuel, water, oxygen to the ISS storage tanks; and fully automated docking systems. The Ariane 5 launcher can put 21 tonnes into LEO.
"It's like a reusable bottle costs more to make than a disposable one." However, SpaceX's reusable launcher is their expendable launcher. It's the same hardware. Essentially, they are just looking at how many times they can reuse their "disposable bottle".
The Shuttle has poisoned the idea of reusability, but the Shuttle was never really suited to be reusable. Every system pushed the state-of-the-art to its limit - engines, heat-shield, tank, boosters - rather than taking what was then known (Saturn II, Saturn V, etc) and saying, "Can we save money by recovering/reusing a first-stage/capsule?" and then spending a decade gradually working outwards from that.
"You have to take the whole thing apart and rebuild everything". The system has been designed for the engines to be quickly removed and swapped out. (For example, they've removed engines, fixed valves, restored everything and re-prepped for launch within a day. IIRC, they've swapped out an engine on a vehicle at the Cape in 5 hours.)
Once they regularly recover stages, the recovered engines will all go into an engine-pool, where they will be tested individually; nine working engines will be fitted to a first stage and test fired together. Then the full rocket is assembled, raised onto the launch-pad and test fired again the day before launch. But the thing is...
"and you have to make everything stronger to take repeated use." But the thing is... they do the same thing with new engines anyway! Every engine is test fired at least three times between manufacture and launch. It's how they are designed. So it's not an extra "reusability" procedure, an extra cost, it's what they already do; and, according to Musk, it's not only a small part of SpaceX's launch cost, it's one of the reasons their costs are so low. So if you have already designed them for multiple-uses, it's pretty unlikely they'll work exactly four times and then suddenly stop. (Apparently they've test fired the engines dozens of times. So the only issue is whether there's additional wear/damage during actual flight that shortens the life. And recovering a few first stages would be a great way to have a look, yes?)
Next time you are in a supermarket, have a look at their handset/recharge/charge-card display. Chances are they have dozens of "pre-paid starter kits" for every carrier (and reseller) in your area. These contain just a SIM card, no handset.
Even with carrier-locked handsets, you can normally use any new SIM kit from that carrier. More importantly, you can buy almost any brand of handset unlocked from the manufacturer, and hence run any SIM kit from nearly any carrier. This is particularly useful for travellers who want to avoid the hideous "international roaming" charges from their own carrier.
Carrier-approval is only required for subsidised phones sold through their own branded outlets. And my guess is that the Fortune500 companies buying these crypto-phones for their senior people are going to buy them outright, unlocked, not wait for carrier-subsidised versions to come out.
Have you honestly never heard of people buying SIM cards for existing phones? Outright purchase? Unlocked phones?
While many like to blame the USAF for this, there were no "USAF requirements". It was NASA who wanted to bring USAF into the shuttle development, believing it would increase funding. It backfired on them.
But the problem with the shuttle wasn't just scope-creep, it was the fact that they threw away everything they'd done up to that point (both Apollo/Gemini/Mercury and the USAF's X-plane program) and tried to develop a 100 ton to LEO space plane in a single step. No precursors, no incremental development. Specifically ignoring the very process that they used for Apollo development. There weren't even unmanned test launches before they flew humans in 1981. All in the false belief that it would somehow save money.
The whole design process was broken.
And they repeated the same stupidity with VentureStar, where even the sub-scale demonstrator required a dozen brand new technologies (one of which wasn't successfully developed until a decade after X-33 had been cancelled.) As did the USAF with NASP. Trying to jump ten steps in one. Trying to shoe-horn every new idea into a single program, in a single step.
Putin apologists remind me of battered wives. If only you could stop making him mad, everything would be okay.
There's a reason why Eastern Europe was rushing to try to join NATO. And they were right. They're going to be rushing even harder now.
It was one of the few things at NASA that made money!
WTF are you on about? NASA never sold engines or rockets. Nothing at NASA ever "made money" from commercial launches or engine sales.
We don't currently have a reusable orbital vehicle that can reach the space station, no, but in a pinch, we can copy the Russian module....
The Russians don't have a "reusable orbital vehicle".
Ares and the Constellation program. That program would be up and running
When it was cancelled, Ares I's schedule was slipping to the right slightly more than one year per year.
That way lies only madness.
Obama [...] wanted to speed up Commercial Crew (also from W's time
Minor quibble, only COTS (cargo) was from W's time. While CC was advocated by O'Keefe as part of his "Spiral" proposal, it wasn't actually started until Obama/Bolden in 2010.
[Spiral was actually a good plan; COTS, CC, commercial stations, fuel depots, modular BEO ships, etc. Even W's VSE was okay, if enabled through Spiral. Then Griffin killed any hope of progress by dragging in his own Ares plans from LM and making them the centrepiece of VSE. And we've lost a decade so far due.]
They were a magnificent achievement for the '70s
No. Bad design, bad development program and non-existent development path, bad operations, etc. It was astonishing that they got such monstrosities to fly at all (let alone for over 20 years), but they were not "magnificent".
They were more like the Spruce Goose, or Concord, or Russian K-7, or Caproni Ca60, or other ridiculous aircraft.
Define cost effective.'
What 20 tonne payload for $1.5b per launch is not.
[$203b / 135 launches. Theoretical payload was 24 tonnes, practical payload limit was 18 tonnes to allow for RTLS abort.]
The X-37B launches on the Atlas V, which uses Russian engines.
GPS was designed by and for the US military during the Cold War. If it isn't designed to work without Russian ground stations, someone should probably be shot.
Antares also uses Russian engines (NK-33), so if GPS satellites are deemed military by Russia, Antares will lose access to Russian engines if it agrees to launch them.
Only Delta IV and F9 & FH seem untouchable for US launches.
Not necessarily. It will just score Aerojet $5b in emergency USAF funding to copy the RD-180 engines. And, hmmm, what can we cut to help pay for it... oh, this "commercial crew" isn't necessary compared to Issues Of National Security Importance, so let's just kill that. Hey it's a crisis, we've all got to make sacrifices. Plus another $3b "Guaranteed Access Payment" for Boeing for more Delta cores. Oh, and special legislation to ban lawsuits over National Security Payload contracts.
You're suggesting they'll be sensible and actually do something to ensure launches for USAF/etc payloads. I'm saying that history says they'll use any crisis to fuck over their rivals and reward their friends, regardless of the actual cost to the country.
If "suicidal pilot" was the most insane of the theories being thrown around (and intensely and angrily believed by so many people), we wouldn't be having most of these arguments.
If you believe a short burst of toxic smoke filled the cabin and killed the crew without the same fire causing enough damage to kill everyone else
Although there have been fires that have killed the pilots but left passengers alive, that's not what I said, nor is it any kind of requirement of the "fire scenario". I'm not sure where you got that idea from.
Aside: If you think the passengers would have tried to communicate/get-help if the plane was damaged, then you should also believe the passengers would have tried to communicate if the plane was hijacked. Making the various hijacking theories even more unlikely. (And certainly, post-9/11, no-one just sits there and obeys hijackers anymore.)
You need a pretty magic fire to knock out most of the electronics
That's not what was said. Learn to read.
First step when the pilots identify an electrical fire is to pull the breakers. (If it works, you reintroduce them one at a time until you isolate the fault.)
Second step is to turn towards a suitable landing site. The closest runway had an approach over mountains, so the pilots seem to have turned to an airport with a more open approach, then changed course again a little later (suggesting the issue had become more serious), they may also have increased altitude to try to starve the fire. That seems to be their last intentional manoeuvre.
There may have been a depressurisation during the climb (caused by the fire), pilot error, or some other screw up. Most accidents have a primary cause, but a bunch of other stuff going wrong. AF-447 was initially caused by a faulty air-speed sensor, but ultimately a series of mistakes by the pilots killed the plane.
there's no question that a small fire could burn for hours
MH-370 had only just taken off. Pilots who've discussed this are thinking nose wheel-well fire filling the cabin with toxic smoke. The question is why the pilots didn't use their own oxygen supply. (They might have delayed turning on the main cabin oxygen, fearing feeding the fire (a la SAA 295), but why delay using their own supply?) Bad decision by the pilots, or flaw in the 777?
Or any of the millions of shipping containers roaming around the world every day, for a few grand.
I think you're conflating the satellite pings [...] and the ultrasonic "pings" that the submerged flight data recorder
Chinese and Australian searchers picked up possible sonar pings from the FDR beacon. But were unable to confirm the findings enough before the beacon died.
In any case, the simplest answer is to have planes transmit a GPS fix a couple times per hour to a satellite communication network. The cost would be negligible compared to the overall operation cost of the airplane.
Yeah. It stuns me that they don't have position pings once every fifteen minutes (plus twice more on heading, speed and altitude changes.) It would revolutionise aircraft S&R.
Hell, why don't large aircraft transmit position, heading, airspeed, altitude, etc continuously to their home organisations? The bandwidth required is trivial, a few kb/s would be more than enough even for things like fuel/climb-rate/turn-rate/cabin-pressure/alarms/etc. The satellites needed have existed for decades.
The rest of the explanation is that the crew were overcome by smoke/fumes. (They're supposed to have independent (bottled) oxygen supply, but it's happened before.) The aircraft flew on autopilot on the last entered heading until it ran out of fuel. (Which has also happened before.)
Why didn't they call a mayday earlier? The rule of thumb for pilots is: Aviation/Navigation/Communication. First you get control of the aircraft, understand what is happening. Then you work out your position/course and heading (actual and intended). Then, and only then, do you worry about telling anyone about it. If they were caught between "Navigation" and "Communication", that would explain their actions and their silence.
You are probably scoffing and going "Bah, what are the odds of that!" But your alternative scenarios are "Plane was hijacked by... conspiracy... secret landing... passengers killed/being held.... etc..."
So the contrast is, "Thing which has happened to aircraft several times before", versus "Bizarre conspiracy by shadowy forces". I prefer the odds of the former until there's actual evidence of the latter.
don't look at me - I didn't set permissions [...] The receptionist got to have a long chat with the Sr. Partner spearheading the project about the use of the company PCs.
I would suggest the Sr. Partner was (like TFS and GP) blaming the wrong person. If your receptionist can delete your billing system, you are doing computers wrong and should probably just give up the whole technology thing.
We see the same attitude when companies threaten/injunct/sue academics who discuss technical flaws in security systems. As if showing that the security is lame caused the security to be lame.
but I don't think they should go about it through taking advantage of overreaching executive order.
They didn't. SpaceX requested an injunction to freeze USAF contracting more launches to ULA. They didn't request an injunction on engine purchases from Russia.
The judge decided to add that one herself.
No, he means queue. Coz it's one damn thing after another.