but ISS is generally considered to be in a medium-altitude orbit
Not unless you are using a completely different taxonomy than everyone else. The ISS orbits at an altitude of 400 km (+/- around 20 km). That is most definitely LEO. You are right that there is a vagueness in the taxonomy, but in my experience the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) region is generally considered to start somewhere between 800 km and 1400 km (Globalstar operates at ~1400 km, and is typically considered LEO), never as low as 400 km.
And in order to "never fall back down" you MUST eventually achieve a speed of ~25Kmph or you most certainly WILL fall back down. I know you don;t understand any of this but it's true none the less.
Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, but this is essentially false. The so-called "escape velocity" is simply the instantaneous velocity that you would need to have to be in a parabolic orbit (i.e. one at which you have zero velocity at an "infinite distance" - usually equated with the edge of the Earth's "sphere of influence" - from the Earth), thus giving you some idea of the delta-v (change in velocity between your current geocentric velocity and escape velocity) that you would need to generate in order to "escape Earth's influence". The instantaneous "escape velocity" is actually a vector, and should be directed perpendicular to the vector from the center of the Earth to your spacecraft. If you generated a greater instantaneous velocity (with the same direction) you would end up in a hyperbolic trajectory - this is how interplanetary missions are typically launched, because they want enough "hyperbolic excess" velocity at the edge of the Earth's sphere of influence to enable them to proceed into a heliocentric orbit that is substantially different than the Earth's orbit about the Sun. If you generated a smaller instantaneous velocity you would end up in an elliptical orbit about the Earth. Generate too small a velocity, and you end up in a ballistic trajectory - your "orbit" intersects the surface of the Earth.
Note that all of the above is couched in terms of instantaneous delta-v's (which is typically how very preliminary trajectory calculations are done), and neglects atmospheric drag effects. In real life a rocket burns for a finite (rather than infinitesimal) amount of time so there is no instantaneous delta-v. You have to take into account atmospheric drag, gravity losses, and the fact that pure Keplerian orbit mechanics don't apply to a thrusting spacecraft. Bottom line: "escape velocity" is a convenient back-of-the-envelope number derived from simplifying assumptions, and is really only applicable if you are interested in going interplanetary.
Disclaimer: I am not a rocket scientist. I am however a spacecraft systems engineer with a rough grasp of basic astrodynamics.
The X-33 was a modern (1990's) program - hence my comment about "next generation shuttle". I'm not dissing NASA's efforts from the 60's, I'm dissing their modern efforts, which have been a dismal failure.
BTW, rumor has it that Rutan eschews complex computer simulations in favor of testing real hardware models, so I don't think that your comment about NASA "having the benefit" of computers is even that valid.
What's he's done is little different from shooting a man out of a slick looking cannon that can happen to blow him 60 miles high.
And little different from what Alan Shepard did in the original Mercury/Redstone launch. But it's a start. And it does count as "space flight".
And don't forget...to go that fast you need special materials to withstand the heat effects (>1000 degrees F) that occur at such velocities when back in atmosphere.
That's not necessarily true. There have been designs for aluminum-based thermal protection systems. Of course, most of them make use of complex transpiration-cooling systems to stop the aluminum from melting:-) Personally, I would wager that Rutan and Co. will go with some form of ablative shielding (like the old Mercury/Gemini/Apollo capsules), probably a spray-on ablator that can be reasonably quickly replaced. That kind of approach seems in line with the general philosophy of the SpaceShipOne design (for example, their use of a hybrid rocket engine).
but he's NO WHERE NEAR achieving a true suborbital flight
Actually, they just achieved suborbital flight. It's orbital flight that they are still a ways from achieving.
Low earth orbit usually implies a modest inclination to the equator
Not really. The ISS is up around 51 degrees inclination or so. And there are plenty of LEO sats in polar or sun-synchronous with inclinations up around 90 deg (greater in the case of the sun-synch orbits). In fact, higher inclinations are favored for LEO satellites because it allows them to cover a greater portion of the globe with their limited footprint (versus just covering the same 100km wide stretch over and over again).
The parent post was correctly quoting Han Solo from Star Wars: A New Hope. So if you want to nitpick on units you probably need to contact George Lucas directly.
Aside: I can't believe that I'm actually having to explain this to anyone who reads Slashdot:-p
The Air Force, Navy, and Marines tend to require uncorrected vision to begin flight training, but allow some correction once they've got money invested in you
Unless things have changed in the last 7 years or so, the Navy requires 20/30 in each eye, correctable to 20/20, in order to qualify for flight training. Once you've earned your wings, your vision can drop as low as 20/70 (correctable) and you will still be categorized as Service Group 1 (which means that you can fly anything you like). If your vision degrades below 20/70 you start to face restrictions on what you can fly, e.g. fighters are out. I believe that USMC requirements are fairly similar to the USN's. Not sure exactly what the USAF looks for, but IIRC their requirement was 20/40 (correctable) to qualify for flight training.
AFAIK, none of them allow any sort of corrective eye surgery, as there's concerns the sutures could rupture in high performance maneuvers
Last I heard, the USN and USMC consider PRK or LASIK to be disqualifying for entry into flight programs. However, the USN is actively studying PRK, so it may be allowed sometime in the near future.
Suborbital. Minimal payload capacity. Has NASA designed anything to that kind of spec since the early 60s?
Well, the X-33 program was somewhere in that class. It was supposed to be a half-scale demonstrator for the next generation shuttle. Of course, in NASA's case they spent ~8 years, and around $200M, and didn't even produce flying hardware (let alone something that could attempt an actual suborbital hop). Whereas Rutan and Scaled Composites have apparently spent roughly a 10th the money that NASA did and now have something that has been off the ground, and will soon be suborbital.
I don't think you are comparing the same things. If the Apollo rocket blew up when launching there is not much that the playbook could have done.
The Apollo rockets had a small auxiliary rocket, known as the escape tower, attached to the top of the crew module. This rocket could be fired to pul the crew clear of a damaged launch vehicle. True, in the event of an instantaneous explosion it might not do much good. But for a case like Challenger where it was a smaller explosion followed by rapid disintegration it might have done so good. Failing that, perhaps the ejection seats that they carried in the first few shuttle launches may have helped (please note that I haven't studied this in depth, so I don't know for sure).
If the Shuttle had an impact with space debris while in orbit or if live support failed, I'm sure nasa would have a similair playbook.
I'm not so sure. The effects of the ice impact that resulted in the destruction of Columbia were functionally identical to an orbit debris impact (in fact, one of the early theories was that the cause was a debris impact). I didn't see NASA exercising any part of its "playbook". In fact, they don't even bother to check for damage caused by debris (or ice for that matter) before reentering. So having a "playbook" wouldn't matter, because the astronauts have no way to know that they need to use it. Thankfully, it sounds like this is changing in the wake of Columbia. It's just a shame that they didn't bother to take these precautions earlier.
Not to mention the fact that NASA's Orbital Space Plan program, and now the CEV program, are slated to use man-rated versions of the nominally commercial Delta IV and Atlas V expendable launch vehicles (I say "nominally" because both LVs, although offered for commercial launches, were developed under the DOD's EELV program and thus paid for by the government).
...properly managing spares, minimizing MTBF and MTTR...
Actually, you'd probably want to maximize your MTBF (really, your MTTF), and minimize your MTTR (MTBF=MTTF+MTTR). You want to make failures infrequent, and the time required to repair them short, thus maximizing both reliability and availability. Many groups (yes, including the USN) have been working on sparing, reliability, and dependability, for many years. It is much less of a black art than it used to be, and there are a number of well known and commonly used techniques for improving dependability. The problem is that they tend to require large amounts of redundancy, which is not exactly compatible with a mass-constrained space mission.
Given that the payments are made to them in something they are desperate for - hard cash - it's likely that the price has little relation to cost.
Given that continually selling something for significantly less than it costs you to rpoduce it is a recipe for rapid bankruptcy it's likely that there is some relationship between price and cost. Otherwise they'd probably already be out of business.
Additionally, the manufacturers of Soyuz didn't pay for design, development, or infrastructure.
Neither did the manufacturers of the shuttle. Or pretty much any other American launch vehicle for that matter, since most of them were developed for government use under government contract. And besides,it's not like shuttle launch costs are actually being used to recoup the costs of shuttle R&D.
They pay nearly third world wages. And they don't have stockholders or investors to answer to.
Ditto NASA. So what's your point?
The low price of a Soyuz seat or launch is a historical accident resulting from the confluence of multiple factors, not something that the West is certain to reach just by working FBC.
Who said anything about FBC? My point was that (and there have been many studies to back this up) for the current flight rates experienced by the US a reusable launch vehicle is not cost-effective. Perhaps the Soyuz/Shuttle comparison wasn't the best one to make, given the large number of other factors involved. But the fact remains that RLVs make no economic sense at the present flight rates, no matter how much I wish that weren't the case. It remains to be seen whether low-cost expendables, or incremental development of reusable (ala X-Prize), is the best way to raise the demand for flights.
Lastly; for that low price you also get low performance. My wife's 1998 Escort has a higher cargo capacity.
Presumably your wife's Escort doesn't go into orbit. Regardless, why would you need large cargo capacity on a manned vehicle. Launch the big stuff on unmanned vehicles, and send the astronauts up on something else.
Happily the right people had read the papers, but there were no 'rescue procedures', just a few (very rough) guidelines and 'what if' papers.
My point was that, although they didn't have a specific plan that said "in the event that a short causes one of the tanks to explosively vent and blow the side off the spacecraft, do X", they had at least thought through the possible responses to potentially catastrophic events, and developed concepts (such as the "LEM as Lifeboat" idea) for recovering the crew. Unlike the shuttle situation, in which they were apparently completely unprepared to deal with damage to the TPS (which you had to figure was going to happen sooner or later).
The one constellation that I know has been successful has been the GPS constellation. Of course there already is a competitor that is being built, and it doesn't hurt that the DOD investment alone justifies its existance. Even that is not a cheap group of satellites to maintain.
As it turns out, I spent quite a bit of time working on the proposed GPS III spacecraft (first launch sometime around 2010). "Not cheap" doesn't even begin to describe it. But the GPS constellation is not in any way supported by a commercial business model. It exists purely to support the DOD. Commercial or civilian use is a convenient byproduct (although the newer GPS requirements documents do try to take into consideration civilian needs to a certain extent - it's mostly as a courtesy though).
Other constellations that are, or seem to be so far, successful: TDRSS (again, not really commercial), Inmarsat (international org), XMradio (commercial), Disaster Monitoring Constellation (pseudo-commercial). But yeah, there really aren't that many, and launch cost does play a big part in that.
The parent targetted NASA in general. I responded about NASA in general.
The parent targetted launch issues - specifically the debacle known as the shuttle, and the effects of shuttle subsidies on the commercial launch market - not NASA in general.
They also have labor costs a tiny fraction of what our labor costs are.
I won't argue that the labor cost issue helps significantly. However, they also benefit from using a robust, flight-proven design with an extremely good record of reliability, and a variety of features that make it cheap to manufacture. Russia is able to launch manned missions for less than it costs the US to launch an unmanned, small payload Pegasus rocket. There's more to it than just labor costs.
For one, the US has plenty of space launches, military and commercial.
[snort] No, they don't. The US averages around 20 launches per year, total. That isn't anywhere near a flight rate sufficient to support the costs of a reusable launch vehicle, even assuming that all 20 launches would be compatible with this hypothetical RLV. Even NASA knows this, which is why when it proposed the shuttle in the first place it (a) essentially demanded that every US payload launch on shuttle, and (b) inflated the flight rate estimate generated from (a) by a factor of (IIRC) 5-10 so that shuttle might actually appear cost-effective.
Secondly, once you get below a certain threshold (usually cited as between 1-2k$/kg), a host of new space opportunies open up.
No argument there. But shuttle clearly doesn't meet that cost target. The launch-cost issue is a classic chicken/egg problem: costs won't go down without flight rates sufficient to amortize the expense of developing the LV, and flight rates won't go up unless costs drop. Right now the most likely road forward appears to be to start by developing a cheap expendable (for example SpaceX's Falcon) that drags costs down enough to make higher flight rates feasible (and to prove that the flight rates actually will increase). Once that happens, it should be easier to justify the development of a more expensive RLV.
Which problems are you referring to about this?
The ice problems that caused Columbia's demise were specifically identified in several pre-accident studies. I've also heard (from friends who work directly with some of the original designers of the shuttle) that "we knew the RCC was fragile and wouldn't sustain an impact - that's why we deliberately designed the external tank to minimize icing" (note that the tank design was later changed). The O-ring issue is a little more uncertain, but it is clear that there were strong reasons to be careful with operating the shuttle in cold weather. Regardless of the specific failure modes, the lack of (in the case of Challenger) crew ejection/evacuation capabilities, or (in the case of Columbia) facilities for tile evaluation and repair, seems like poor preparation.
NASA had no scenarios for what happened with Apollo 13.
That was my point - they hadn't thought of the specific failure scenario for Apollo 13, but they had spent a lot of time thinking about how to recover if things did go wrong. Contrary to what the movie showed, they didn't (for example) just make up the method for using CM CO2 scrubbers in the LEM on the spot. That was something they'd already worked out ahead, and had in a "playbook" of responses to possible crises. Don't get me wrong, the Apollo 13 team did a fantastic job getting their crew home. But they did it by improvising based on a set of pre-prepared actions. Unlike shuttle, they had options available if things went south.
If "the other guy" can't manage to do it either, it points out how hard the task is.
Or it shows that they're just as screwed up as we are. Or that they are all sitting around saying "well, if the US can't do it, why would we be able to?"
Because they don't want to vote for their opponent, regardless of what is actually being voted on. Often both parties are offering very similar bills. Like I said before, it's a power game.
Iridium already managed a fairly cheap launch-cost per satellite by multi-manifesting several satellites on a single launcher (and yes, Iridium was only going to LEO - that was the whole point). I'll also note that the sophistication of the Iridium satellites was driven by the services that Iridium offered, and I doubt you'd be able to construct a less sophisticated satellite able to provide comparable service. The Globalstar constellation took an alternative approach with a different set of services, and did have a significantly less sophisticated satellite than Iridium. But they also had severe financial difficulties. See also OrbComm, which had about the simplest satellite you could make. While all of these constellations are, AFAIK, still in operation, they have not really made any money. Clearly there's more going on here than launch costs or satellite costs.
Elon Musk's SpaceX is already near to test-flying a launch vehicle capable of putting up small LEO satellites for around $5M. I doubt SpaceDev is anywhere near as close to providing that kind of service.
Currently, satellite launches can cost in the hundreds of millions.
Currently, satellite launches can cost anywhere between a couple of hundred thousand (as a secondary payload) to hundreds of millions. It depends a lot on what you are trying to launch, and to where. The expensive launches are typically large (1000's of kilograms) satellites going to GEO. That said, $5M a launch will be a significant reduction for primary launch capability, but it will probably intially only be to LEO altitudes.
NASA has accomplished amazing things in the present, too. I am amazed by the stuff coming back from Cassini and the rovers.
Which is all well and good, but has very little to do with the manned spaceflight or launch issues that the parent post was concerned with. I'll note here that MER launched on a Delta II rocket, while Cassini launched on a Titan IV - neither of which, you will notice, is the much vaunted "reusable" shuttle.
Ok, YOU design a cheaper space vehicle. How dare you call it "criminally poor"? Are you aware of how difficult of a task developing a reusable man-capable orbital launch vehicle is? Name someone else who has done it better and cheaper.
Why make it reusable? The Russian Space Agency still uses expendable Soyuz capsules, and has a per-launch cost significantly below anything in the West. Reusability only makes sense if you have a high enough flight rate to make it cost-effective, and the sad fact is that right now we simply don't have anywhere near those kind of flight rates for manned launches.
How would YOU have predicted the specific problems that would occur in a spacecraft with millions of parts reentering the atmosphere? How would YOU decide which ones would be troublemakers?
Part of the problem is that NASA did predict the specific problems, but adopted a "well it's worked so far" policy, and did not bother to address what might happen if it didn't work. Given the cost of a shuttle (not to mention the lives of the crew) it seems silly to not have at least considered the possible failure scenarios, and what might be done about them (in contrast to the Apollo 13 mishap, in which the crew was saved due to recovery procedures that had been developed in the years preceding the actual lunar landings).
Want to look at other nation's space agencies?
Not really. The point is not to be "better than the other guy", the point is to do things right.
So, please keep your criticisms to yourself.
Criticism is part of good engineering. There's a reason that things like design reviews are held. If you can't objectively evaluate a system (be it a launch vehicle, or an organization), or take the time to consider alternative approaches, you will never improve. You will also be that much more likely to kill people.
That's because congressional voting isn't about achieving anything useful or beneficial, it's about political maneuvers to gain power. American politics is about a war for control between the Republicans and Democrats. Any benefit to the public is a purely incidental side effect. What they actually do once they have power is rarely different from what the other crowd would do if they had power.
I still can't believe that *anyone* falls for the false "Republican/Democrat" dichotomy in American politics. The rhetoric may be different, but there is very little functional difference between R's and D's. They *both* want to tell you how to live your life, and they *both* want to take your money to help them fund the various campaigns and agnecies that they use to tell you how to live. You might argue that they will tell you to live your life in different ways, and it's those differences that matter. But, when you stop and evaluate what they're pushing, you find that the differences are *very* minor, and often more a difference in presentation rather than end-result.
Not necessarily. Corporations are not fundamentally a part of the capitalist system. They are legal fictions created by governments. Many of the evils of corporatism are a result of the various laws that have been passed to benefit the government-sanctioned entities known as corporations. So, in a sense the existence of corporations (as opposed to e.g. some form of contract-based cooperative agreement between individuals that has no legal standing outside of contract law) constitutes a government interference in the market, and as such could be considered the antithesis of capitalism. The power of that hypothetical cooperative would (presumably) be significantly less than that of a corporation, because it wouldn't receive all of the tax breaks, subsidies, shielding from liability, etc.
It seems a little bizarre to me that most of the commission's recommendations for NASA boil down to "you need to do things more like the DoD". The reason it seems bizarre is that the matra in DoD space circles for the last couple of years has been "space is broken" - i.e. many of the programs are sadly over-budget, over-schedule, or otherwise screwed up.
Perhaps the intention is to emulate the practices that the DoD is trying to use to fix their space problems. But these practices have had limited implementation so far, and its not clear that they actually help at all. Besides, having seen first-hand how many DoD space programs (including some of extreme national importance) are run, I'm not sure that the DoD is necessarily the best model to be following. I won't even get into how idiotic the whole "systems-of-systems" buzzword/fad is.
As an aside, I wonder if one of the reasons for the commission's recommendation to spin off the NASA centers into FFRDCs is Aldridge's experience as the president of a space-focused FFRDC (The Aerospace Corporation).
Uh, you seem a little confused on names. Do you mean Frederik Pohl, or Poul Anderson (both quite distinctly different authors)? Or were you really trying to name Larry Niven - the guy who wrote Ringworld and the Known Space stuff (including the Man-Kzin wars) - and just totally confused about who authored what?
the particularly lousy security at Boston Logan airport was largely to blame for the 9/11 events
I call bullsh*t on this. The security at Boston Logan did exactly what it was supposed to do. It even flagged some of the hijackers as security risks, and searched them. But the hijackers didn't have bombs, so they were considered ok to let on board. That wasn't a security contractor decision, that was an FAA decision (i.e. the federal government - just like the TSA). Boxcutters were not considered a threat, and thus were not banned from airlines. 9/11 was not the result of poor security practices, it was the result of a change in terrorist tactics (hijacking for suicide missions versus hijacking for hostage releases), and a lack of foresight on the part of the federal government.
Slashdot Mirror
Not unless you are using a completely different taxonomy than everyone else. The ISS orbits at an altitude of 400 km (+/- around 20 km). That is most definitely LEO. You are right that there is a vagueness in the taxonomy, but in my experience the Medium Earth Orbit (MEO) region is generally considered to start somewhere between 800 km and 1400 km (Globalstar operates at ~1400 km, and is typically considered LEO), never as low as 400 km.
Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, but this is essentially false. The so-called "escape velocity" is simply the instantaneous velocity that you would need to have to be in a parabolic orbit (i.e. one at which you have zero velocity at an "infinite distance" - usually equated with the edge of the Earth's "sphere of influence" - from the Earth), thus giving you some idea of the delta-v (change in velocity between your current geocentric velocity and escape velocity) that you would need to generate in order to "escape Earth's influence". The instantaneous "escape velocity" is actually a vector, and should be directed perpendicular to the vector from the center of the Earth to your spacecraft. If you generated a greater instantaneous velocity (with the same direction) you would end up in a hyperbolic trajectory - this is how interplanetary missions are typically launched, because they want enough "hyperbolic excess" velocity at the edge of the Earth's sphere of influence to enable them to proceed into a heliocentric orbit that is substantially different than the Earth's orbit about the Sun. If you generated a smaller instantaneous velocity you would end up in an elliptical orbit about the Earth. Generate too small a velocity, and you end up in a ballistic trajectory - your "orbit" intersects the surface of the Earth.
Note that all of the above is couched in terms of instantaneous delta-v's (which is typically how very preliminary trajectory calculations are done), and neglects atmospheric drag effects. In real life a rocket burns for a finite (rather than infinitesimal) amount of time so there is no instantaneous delta-v. You have to take into account atmospheric drag, gravity losses, and the fact that pure Keplerian orbit mechanics don't apply to a thrusting spacecraft. Bottom line: "escape velocity" is a convenient back-of-the-envelope number derived from simplifying assumptions, and is really only applicable if you are interested in going interplanetary.
Disclaimer: I am not a rocket scientist. I am however a spacecraft systems engineer with a rough grasp of basic astrodynamics.
BTW, rumor has it that Rutan eschews complex computer simulations in favor of testing real hardware models, so I don't think that your comment about NASA "having the benefit" of computers is even that valid.
And little different from what Alan Shepard did in the original Mercury/Redstone launch. But it's a start. And it does count as "space flight".
And don't forget...to go that fast you need special materials to withstand the heat effects (>1000 degrees F) that occur at such velocities when back in atmosphere.
That's not necessarily true. There have been designs for aluminum-based thermal protection systems. Of course, most of them make use of complex transpiration-cooling systems to stop the aluminum from melting :-) Personally, I would wager that Rutan and Co. will go with some form of ablative shielding (like the old Mercury/Gemini/Apollo capsules), probably a spray-on ablator that can be reasonably quickly replaced. That kind of approach seems in line with the general philosophy of the SpaceShipOne design (for example, their use of a hybrid rocket engine).
but he's NO WHERE NEAR achieving a true suborbital flight
Actually, they just achieved suborbital flight. It's orbital flight that they are still a ways from achieving.
Not really. The ISS is up around 51 degrees inclination or so. And there are plenty of LEO sats in polar or sun-synchronous with inclinations up around 90 deg (greater in the case of the sun-synch orbits). In fact, higher inclinations are favored for LEO satellites because it allows them to cover a greater portion of the globe with their limited footprint (versus just covering the same 100km wide stretch over and over again).
The parent post was correctly quoting Han Solo from Star Wars: A New Hope. So if you want to nitpick on units you probably need to contact George Lucas directly.
Aside: I can't believe that I'm actually having to explain this to anyone who reads Slashdot :-p
Unless things have changed in the last 7 years or so, the Navy requires 20/30 in each eye, correctable to 20/20, in order to qualify for flight training. Once you've earned your wings, your vision can drop as low as 20/70 (correctable) and you will still be categorized as Service Group 1 (which means that you can fly anything you like). If your vision degrades below 20/70 you start to face restrictions on what you can fly, e.g. fighters are out. I believe that USMC requirements are fairly similar to the USN's. Not sure exactly what the USAF looks for, but IIRC their requirement was 20/40 (correctable) to qualify for flight training.
AFAIK, none of them allow any sort of corrective eye surgery, as there's concerns the sutures could rupture in high performance maneuvers
Last I heard, the USN and USMC consider PRK or LASIK to be disqualifying for entry into flight programs. However, the USN is actively studying PRK, so it may be allowed sometime in the near future.
Well, the X-33 program was somewhere in that class. It was supposed to be a half-scale demonstrator for the next generation shuttle. Of course, in NASA's case they spent ~8 years, and around $200M, and didn't even produce flying hardware (let alone something that could attempt an actual suborbital hop). Whereas Rutan and Scaled Composites have apparently spent roughly a 10th the money that NASA did and now have something that has been off the ground, and will soon be suborbital.
The Apollo rockets had a small auxiliary rocket, known as the escape tower, attached to the top of the crew module. This rocket could be fired to pul the crew clear of a damaged launch vehicle. True, in the event of an instantaneous explosion it might not do much good. But for a case like Challenger where it was a smaller explosion followed by rapid disintegration it might have done so good. Failing that, perhaps the ejection seats that they carried in the first few shuttle launches may have helped (please note that I haven't studied this in depth, so I don't know for sure).
If the Shuttle had an impact with space debris while in orbit or if live support failed, I'm sure nasa would have a similair playbook.
I'm not so sure. The effects of the ice impact that resulted in the destruction of Columbia were functionally identical to an orbit debris impact (in fact, one of the early theories was that the cause was a debris impact). I didn't see NASA exercising any part of its "playbook". In fact, they don't even bother to check for damage caused by debris (or ice for that matter) before reentering. So having a "playbook" wouldn't matter, because the astronauts have no way to know that they need to use it. Thankfully, it sounds like this is changing in the wake of Columbia. It's just a shame that they didn't bother to take these precautions earlier.
Not to mention the fact that NASA's Orbital Space Plan program, and now the CEV program, are slated to use man-rated versions of the nominally commercial Delta IV and Atlas V expendable launch vehicles (I say "nominally" because both LVs, although offered for commercial launches, were developed under the DOD's EELV program and thus paid for by the government).
Actually, you'd probably want to maximize your MTBF (really, your MTTF), and minimize your MTTR (MTBF=MTTF+MTTR). You want to make failures infrequent, and the time required to repair them short, thus maximizing both reliability and availability. Many groups (yes, including the USN) have been working on sparing, reliability, and dependability, for many years. It is much less of a black art than it used to be, and there are a number of well known and commonly used techniques for improving dependability. The problem is that they tend to require large amounts of redundancy, which is not exactly compatible with a mass-constrained space mission.
Given that continually selling something for significantly less than it costs you to rpoduce it is a recipe for rapid bankruptcy it's likely that there is some relationship between price and cost. Otherwise they'd probably already be out of business.
Additionally, the manufacturers of Soyuz didn't pay for design, development, or infrastructure.
Neither did the manufacturers of the shuttle. Or pretty much any other American launch vehicle for that matter, since most of them were developed for government use under government contract. And besides,it's not like shuttle launch costs are actually being used to recoup the costs of shuttle R&D.
They pay nearly third world wages. And they don't have stockholders or investors to answer to.
Ditto NASA. So what's your point?
The low price of a Soyuz seat or launch is a historical accident resulting from the confluence of multiple factors, not something that the West is certain to reach just by working FBC.
Who said anything about FBC? My point was that (and there have been many studies to back this up) for the current flight rates experienced by the US a reusable launch vehicle is not cost-effective. Perhaps the Soyuz/Shuttle comparison wasn't the best one to make, given the large number of other factors involved. But the fact remains that RLVs make no economic sense at the present flight rates, no matter how much I wish that weren't the case. It remains to be seen whether low-cost expendables, or incremental development of reusable (ala X-Prize), is the best way to raise the demand for flights.
Lastly; for that low price you also get low performance. My wife's 1998 Escort has a higher cargo capacity.
Presumably your wife's Escort doesn't go into orbit. Regardless, why would you need large cargo capacity on a manned vehicle. Launch the big stuff on unmanned vehicles, and send the astronauts up on something else.
Happily the right people had read the papers, but there were no 'rescue procedures', just a few (very rough) guidelines and 'what if' papers.
My point was that, although they didn't have a specific plan that said "in the event that a short causes one of the tanks to explosively vent and blow the side off the spacecraft, do X", they had at least thought through the possible responses to potentially catastrophic events, and developed concepts (such as the "LEM as Lifeboat" idea) for recovering the crew. Unlike the shuttle situation, in which they were apparently completely unprepared to deal with damage to the TPS (which you had to figure was going to happen sooner or later).
As it turns out, I spent quite a bit of time working on the proposed GPS III spacecraft (first launch sometime around 2010). "Not cheap" doesn't even begin to describe it. But the GPS constellation is not in any way supported by a commercial business model. It exists purely to support the DOD. Commercial or civilian use is a convenient byproduct (although the newer GPS requirements documents do try to take into consideration civilian needs to a certain extent - it's mostly as a courtesy though).
Other constellations that are, or seem to be so far, successful: TDRSS (again, not really commercial), Inmarsat (international org), XMradio (commercial), Disaster Monitoring Constellation (pseudo-commercial). But yeah, there really aren't that many, and launch cost does play a big part in that.
The parent targetted launch issues - specifically the debacle known as the shuttle, and the effects of shuttle subsidies on the commercial launch market - not NASA in general.
They also have labor costs a tiny fraction of what our labor costs are.
I won't argue that the labor cost issue helps significantly. However, they also benefit from using a robust, flight-proven design with an extremely good record of reliability, and a variety of features that make it cheap to manufacture. Russia is able to launch manned missions for less than it costs the US to launch an unmanned, small payload Pegasus rocket. There's more to it than just labor costs.
For one, the US has plenty of space launches, military and commercial.
[snort] No, they don't. The US averages around 20 launches per year, total. That isn't anywhere near a flight rate sufficient to support the costs of a reusable launch vehicle, even assuming that all 20 launches would be compatible with this hypothetical RLV. Even NASA knows this, which is why when it proposed the shuttle in the first place it (a) essentially demanded that every US payload launch on shuttle, and (b) inflated the flight rate estimate generated from (a) by a factor of (IIRC) 5-10 so that shuttle might actually appear cost-effective.
Secondly, once you get below a certain threshold (usually cited as between 1-2k$/kg), a host of new space opportunies open up.
No argument there. But shuttle clearly doesn't meet that cost target. The launch-cost issue is a classic chicken/egg problem: costs won't go down without flight rates sufficient to amortize the expense of developing the LV, and flight rates won't go up unless costs drop. Right now the most likely road forward appears to be to start by developing a cheap expendable (for example SpaceX's Falcon) that drags costs down enough to make higher flight rates feasible (and to prove that the flight rates actually will increase). Once that happens, it should be easier to justify the development of a more expensive RLV.
Which problems are you referring to about this?
The ice problems that caused Columbia's demise were specifically identified in several pre-accident studies. I've also heard (from friends who work directly with some of the original designers of the shuttle) that "we knew the RCC was fragile and wouldn't sustain an impact - that's why we deliberately designed the external tank to minimize icing" (note that the tank design was later changed). The O-ring issue is a little more uncertain, but it is clear that there were strong reasons to be careful with operating the shuttle in cold weather. Regardless of the specific failure modes, the lack of (in the case of Challenger) crew ejection/evacuation capabilities, or (in the case of Columbia) facilities for tile evaluation and repair, seems like poor preparation.
NASA had no scenarios for what happened with Apollo 13.
That was my point - they hadn't thought of the specific failure scenario for Apollo 13, but they had spent a lot of time thinking about how to recover if things did go wrong. Contrary to what the movie showed, they didn't (for example) just make up the method for using CM CO2 scrubbers in the LEM on the spot. That was something they'd already worked out ahead, and had in a "playbook" of responses to possible crises. Don't get me wrong, the Apollo 13 team did a fantastic job getting their crew home. But they did it by improvising based on a set of pre-prepared actions. Unlike shuttle, they had options available if things went south.
If "the other guy" can't manage to do it either, it points out how hard the task is.
Or it shows that they're just as screwed up as we are. Or that they are all sitting around saying "well, if the US can't do it, why would we be able to?"
Because they don't want to vote for their opponent, regardless of what is actually being voted on. Often both parties are offering very similar bills. Like I said before, it's a power game.
Iridium already managed a fairly cheap launch-cost per satellite by multi-manifesting several satellites on a single launcher (and yes, Iridium was only going to LEO - that was the whole point). I'll also note that the sophistication of the Iridium satellites was driven by the services that Iridium offered, and I doubt you'd be able to construct a less sophisticated satellite able to provide comparable service. The Globalstar constellation took an alternative approach with a different set of services, and did have a significantly less sophisticated satellite than Iridium. But they also had severe financial difficulties. See also OrbComm, which had about the simplest satellite you could make. While all of these constellations are, AFAIK, still in operation, they have not really made any money. Clearly there's more going on here than launch costs or satellite costs.
Currently, satellite launches can cost in the hundreds of millions.
Currently, satellite launches can cost anywhere between a couple of hundred thousand (as a secondary payload) to hundreds of millions. It depends a lot on what you are trying to launch, and to where. The expensive launches are typically large (1000's of kilograms) satellites going to GEO. That said, $5M a launch will be a significant reduction for primary launch capability, but it will probably intially only be to LEO altitudes.
Which is all well and good, but has very little to do with the manned spaceflight or launch issues that the parent post was concerned with. I'll note here that MER launched on a Delta II rocket, while Cassini launched on a Titan IV - neither of which, you will notice, is the much vaunted "reusable" shuttle.
Ok, YOU design a cheaper space vehicle. How dare you call it "criminally poor"? Are you aware of how difficult of a task developing a reusable man-capable orbital launch vehicle is? Name someone else who has done it better and cheaper.
Why make it reusable? The Russian Space Agency still uses expendable Soyuz capsules, and has a per-launch cost significantly below anything in the West. Reusability only makes sense if you have a high enough flight rate to make it cost-effective, and the sad fact is that right now we simply don't have anywhere near those kind of flight rates for manned launches.
How would YOU have predicted the specific problems that would occur in a spacecraft with millions of parts reentering the atmosphere? How would YOU decide which ones would be troublemakers?
Part of the problem is that NASA did predict the specific problems, but adopted a "well it's worked so far" policy, and did not bother to address what might happen if it didn't work. Given the cost of a shuttle (not to mention the lives of the crew) it seems silly to not have at least considered the possible failure scenarios, and what might be done about them (in contrast to the Apollo 13 mishap, in which the crew was saved due to recovery procedures that had been developed in the years preceding the actual lunar landings).
Want to look at other nation's space agencies?
Not really. The point is not to be "better than the other guy", the point is to do things right.
So, please keep your criticisms to yourself.
Criticism is part of good engineering. There's a reason that things like design reviews are held. If you can't objectively evaluate a system (be it a launch vehicle, or an organization), or take the time to consider alternative approaches, you will never improve. You will also be that much more likely to kill people.
That's because congressional voting isn't about achieving anything useful or beneficial, it's about political maneuvers to gain power. American politics is about a war for control between the Republicans and Democrats. Any benefit to the public is a purely incidental side effect. What they actually do once they have power is rarely different from what the other crowd would do if they had power.
I still can't believe that *anyone* falls for the false "Republican/Democrat" dichotomy in American politics. The rhetoric may be different, but there is very little functional difference between R's and D's. They *both* want to tell you how to live your life, and they *both* want to take your money to help them fund the various campaigns and agnecies that they use to tell you how to live. You might argue that they will tell you to live your life in different ways, and it's those differences that matter. But, when you stop and evaluate what they're pushing, you find that the differences are *very* minor, and often more a difference in presentation rather than end-result.
Not necessarily. Corporations are not fundamentally a part of the capitalist system. They are legal fictions created by governments. Many of the evils of corporatism are a result of the various laws that have been passed to benefit the government-sanctioned entities known as corporations. So, in a sense the existence of corporations (as opposed to e.g. some form of contract-based cooperative agreement between individuals that has no legal standing outside of contract law) constitutes a government interference in the market, and as such could be considered the antithesis of capitalism. The power of that hypothetical cooperative would (presumably) be significantly less than that of a corporation, because it wouldn't receive all of the tax breaks, subsidies, shielding from liability, etc.
Perhaps the intention is to emulate the practices that the DoD is trying to use to fix their space problems. But these practices have had limited implementation so far, and its not clear that they actually help at all. Besides, having seen first-hand how many DoD space programs (including some of extreme national importance) are run, I'm not sure that the DoD is necessarily the best model to be following. I won't even get into how idiotic the whole "systems-of-systems" buzzword/fad is.
As an aside, I wonder if one of the reasons for the commission's recommendation to spin off the NASA centers into FFRDCs is Aldridge's experience as the president of a space-focused FFRDC (The Aerospace Corporation).
Uh, you seem a little confused on names. Do you mean Frederik Pohl, or Poul Anderson (both quite distinctly different authors)? Or were you really trying to name Larry Niven - the guy who wrote Ringworld and the Known Space stuff (including the Man-Kzin wars) - and just totally confused about who authored what?
Seems more like parallel murder to me, since it all happened at once...
I call bullsh*t on this. The security at Boston Logan did exactly what it was supposed to do. It even flagged some of the hijackers as security risks, and searched them. But the hijackers didn't have bombs, so they were considered ok to let on board. That wasn't a security contractor decision, that was an FAA decision (i.e. the federal government - just like the TSA). Boxcutters were not considered a threat, and thus were not banned from airlines. 9/11 was not the result of poor security practices, it was the result of a change in terrorist tactics (hijacking for suicide missions versus hijacking for hostage releases), and a lack of foresight on the part of the federal government.