I agree with you when you say that several people should have paid for this fiasco. Certainly a few highly prominent firings at the least, and some probes for negligent homicide might not have been out of hand. And I'm glad that Hubble's been useful, but.... As far as manned flight's usefulness in general, well maybe I an misperceiving your comments, If I am please forgive me, but if we ain't going to settle out in space, start colonizing it, and harvesting the mineral wealth energy abundance, and just plain breathing room it offers then frankly I couldn't care less if the moon is made of green cheese, the stars are little balls of light shining through from heaven, and the Sun revolves around Pluto. At the point that we decide that we don't want to exploit the rest of our system, then learning about it becomes nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It becomes knowledge that might make a few intellectual elites feel good, entertain and astound a few more outside that clique, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us. Pure knowledge that is NEVER going to be turned into practical application isn't worth the effort. It might get somebody a university chair somewhere and be good for settling some Oxford Dons argument with his chums, but beyond that I consider its utility pointless. I think your other points are valid, but the perception I get of your opinion of the relative worth of pure science and astronomy verses manned flight and getting out into the solar system ourselves is completely opposite of my own. Again if I have misperceived it, I apologize, but I'm tired of intellectuals that think the government should be taxing money from people that could be spending it on their own needs, simply to satisfy the intellectuals curiosity on some sterile point about their particular theories of astronomical structure or origins. If that description does not fir you, then again I apologize.
The reason for colonizing Luna and Mars is not science. It is to exploit and use all of the wealth of our system, to expand the collective opportunities for the human race, to challenge our technological ingenuity and provide technological advancement for our society in the feedback, to harness the energy and abundance of all our resources, and in the end - with a little luck and a lot of hard work - give human kind a chance of surviving a single point failure hear on Earth. Hell maybe we can even move our dirty industries to space and clean old Mother Earth up. If it ain't getting us that, then we're wasting EVERY dime that NASA spends on space and we ought to dump everything that isn't to do with improvements in aeronautical engineering and forget about the rest.
Ok, look if Congress overrides this decision then the blame is on them, and you know what? Given that politicians have a wonderous ability to point anywhere else then themselves they won't take that blame. Shawn O'Keefe doesn't have that option. He can't run away or hide if it all goes to Hell in a handcart. He's saddled with an organization that ignored obvious warning signs of a problem (and in my belittled opinion, that was the most signifigant finding of the Review Board) and theres bugger all he can do about it in the short run. So he looked at the manifest list for the shuttles, saw that every single one, except one, was to ISS. Decided that maybe with a year or more to rereview every single thing, have some quiet reassignments of personnel for the more obviously neglectful, and drum one set of procedures for the one set of orbitals and mission procedures that we were going to have to do again, and again, and again, and maybe, just maybe his people might not miss such obvious signs of problems as six inch gashes in protective tiles again. The one lone mission that had signifgantly different parameters, with no safe harbor in case it all went kablooey, got dumped. That was the nuts and bolts of his decision as plainly as he was allowed by political constrants to give it.
As for the board recommendations. True they didn't say "don't go to HST", but they sure did say more then just "have a repair kit handy". Them carbon/carbon edge pieces on the wing fronts were never actually intended to be repaired in space, neither were the silica bricks that make up ninty percent of the rest of the thermal shield. Nobody is really sure if that damn repair kit is worth bupkiss and nobody really wants to put it to the test. This ain't exactly like using a "Fix-a-Flat" kit.
As for scrapping ISS, maybe I wasn't clear, but I gotta say that my sneaky suspicions tell me that nothing would make O'Keefes day more then if he was allowed to. The problem is there is simply no way he can. The ramifications of dunping it are vast (and just 'tween you, me, and the wall, they have very little to do with science. Let me lead you on this one. Take a look at how much of the US manned flight budget is being quietly diverted to the Russian space agency. You gotta read NASA's budget very, very closely to get the right numbers, they've buried it fairly well. ISS is the explanation for a lot of that diversion, the real reason is a litle more convoluted) Leaving that aside, the series of very real commitments we have to numerous nations means we can't unilaterilly terminate it, even if we want to. We owe folks on this one, the previous two administrations, purely in the interests of international brotherhood mind you, made a bunch of commitments to various countries on this, so support it we must. Nah Shawn O'Keefe might want to scrap ISS (and that's just my guess mind you) but there ain't no way he can decide that.
On turn around time at the Cape. Fewer birds means each one flies more often, which means each one has to be serviced more often, each one wears out faster, each one has to be cycled a little faster cause it has to be ready sooner, which means that people stand a better chance of making mistakes, which means, that your risk of going from 3 shuttles down to 2 starts increasing. It makes any delay or problem become even more schedule impacting and things back up more. Argue wither that's 60 or 75 percent imparement, it's still imparement. Quibble me not with the 15 percent when your talking human lives and several Billion dollar investments and unreplaceable launch assets.
To put it bluntly. IN the end Hubble is just a scope, we didn't have it before it launched and still managed to do good astronomy, we won't have it after it fails and we'll probably manage to continue to do good astronomy without it then too, and even if we do the repair mission that's only another five to seven years of time in a best case scenario), and rather then risk it for that I'd rather deorbit
"In your post, you sound as if it's some huge suprise that there's a risk of death when a shuttle launches. This has always been known. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous."
Yea, but you miss my point. Both these loses were not the result of engineering failure as such. Instead they both came from acceptance of a risk that had been flagged and ignored. When the review board considered the background of this failure it found that the previous 40 plus missions had shown a pattern of increasing tile damage and abrasion, yet NASA had ignored the problem cause it never seemed to cause a problem. That's a management failure of the first order. It's not the shuttle that we have come to see as horrendously more dangerous, it's the whole human decision making team behind it. That was the huge pile of donkey poop Happy Danny Goldin left behind for Shawn O'Keefe to have to deal with, and it's an not a problem he can wave a magic wand at overnight and clean up. What you (and to be fair) everyone else who has posted the same way you have) seems to miss. Is that we don't just haul out a shuttle, stuff some parts aboard, and light the fires. There is an ENOURMAS Human machine that goes into motion planning every single part of every single minute of every single mission NASA flies. The paperwork, checklists, documents and other dreck would fill the VAB if it was all on Dead tree format. And that Machine is very, very, clearlly broken. So Shawn O'Keefe has a problem. He can cancel every single shuttle flight, or he can try and put the bandaids in place to handle one set of orbital requirements that we're going to have to do several times. Trying to put in place enough fixes to deal with the subtly different set of challenges that a Hubble mission (which NASA would be doing only once) simply isn't worth it. If you read carefully what O'Keefe said, that was the jist of it. I assure you, that man is gonna be one sleepless individual every time STS launches. Since it's his head on the chopping block, he made the call, you may not like it, but it was his to make and he did it. Thats why it's called an executive decision, because if he called it wrong we execute him (in something less then a figurative sense, of course)
(Yes ok you are technically correct, but technically the catholic church was correct in saying the universe revolves around the earth. They just used a different frame of reference.:)
I am so glad that someone else has realized this, I was begining to think that I was the only one thatunderstood the implication of Einstein to Theology. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now I know I'm not the lone weirdo in the universe!
Sure there are astronauts that would do this, and test pilots and jet jocks galore. Fortunately it's not their decision to make. An older and wiser head has looked at the risk (much larger then previously thought) consider the consequences if it went to hell (loss of yet another shuttle, loss of five to seven MORE astronauts, NASA being gutted after Congress and the public scream in outrage about "Why did you ever do such a thing after the Columbia boards recommendations???") and all the various other fall out, and decided the game ain't worth the candle. Look nobody wants to see Hubble fail, and NASA isn't talking about splashing it down tomorrow. It's got a few good years left. The problem is that the upgrades would only keep it going for five to seven years longer then otherwise and it simply isn't worth risking the human lives and cost to the program. The stars and galaxies and all will be there in a dozen years, why not use this sudden outpouring of concern for this myopic bird, to build a better scope and launch it? Why so much sudden attachment to a scope that everybody and I mean EVERYBODY jumped all over as a bat-blind hair-brained piece of junk when it was launched? I mean it's nice to be loved and all, but let's get some perspective. The truth is that it would be much more fun to design and build a better scope and do even better research. I'm not talking James T. Webb here, I mean a new visible light to UV scope, with better resolution and more thought into the science we would like to do, now that we know what kind of science we can do. And build one that doesn't require the Shuttle, because Shuttle is gone once ISS is finished. We have three shuttles left out of five (which means that we can only do 3/5 of the mission flights we had planned to do every year), we have much more hardware for ISS, which is even more expensive then the repair and replacement parts for Hubble, sitting around in Florida. We have numerous international treaty commitments to our partners, many of whom are supposed to be paid with flight time on ISS for their contributions, which have to be honored. And after the Columbia boards recommendations any NASA administrator that decided to still go ahead with shuttle mission, at those orbital parameters, would be putting himself out on a very long limb, far, far above the ground, and inviting old man Murphy to come along with a saw. Commonsense says "Sorry, but this is a bridge to far." Understand that the game is changed. We got burned once, thought we had learned our mistakes, fixed the obvious problems we saw and went back to flying it. Now we've been burned again, and a LOT of the reasons sound hauntingly familiar. Well fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. NASA manned flight has suddenly gotten VERY, VERY RISK ADVERSE. The idea that "Oh well we fixed these problems, now it's all better" suddenly sounds like a lot of Pollyannaish nonsense. NASA will do what it must with the shuttles, but it will hold its collective breath every time it launches one from now on. Safety is no longer our watchword; it's the ONLY damn thing I hear about nowadays. Congress might vote to override O'Keefe, if they do then on their heads be it. If they do then they better get ready to collectively resign if anything goes wrong, and they better have the letters to the families written in advance, just in case, cause that's what Shawn O'Keefe would have to do if he had made the decision and it went pants, as the Brits say. Those who are so quick to judge aren't the people that will have to explain it to the president, congress, the families, and the general public, until they are, they can darn well be a lot less dogmatic about this. And that's my view for whatever it's worth.
Where is the next round of jobs going to come from?
Who knows!
Silicon Valley and the tech revolution wasn't predictable, even major businesses like IBM couldn't foresee what people would ever do with a computer in their homes, a business sure, but a HOME computer?! What would anyone want one of those for? The Internet came out of left field and was considered something nerds and geeks lived on, and was till HTTP caught on and suddenly it took off through the roof. Now programming and hardware are reaching the commodity level and were all running scared.
So now were back to having to think up the next area and level of creation. Well here are a few areas, if you're really worried: Bio tech, Nano tech, Materials science, Advanced construction tech, Aerospace, Hydrogen technology, Advanced power systems, Materials recycling, Transport tech, etc....
Getting the idea?
I heard these same whines when the Japanese snagged the domestic electronics industry out from under a bunch of slow moving dinosaurs, the same whine when Japan, Germany and Korea started nailing the Auto industry out from under us (they made better built and more reliable vehicles. How unfair of them!). The same whine when the steel industry got nailed, etc, etc, ad nauseum.
Life is competition, from the moment you're born, to the moment you die. Competition for food, for mates, for space, for wealth, for everything. Either you can compete for the pie that's already on the table or you can make more pie. Every new tech that's developed, every new industry created, every new job title thought up, is making a bigger pie. Hewlett and Packard; Jobs and Woz; Gates, Allen, and crew; Barden, Shockley and Brattain; Bell; Marconi; Hollorith; Cray; Watson and Crick; etc, etc, etc all made the pie bigger. Try www.invent.org and look through their Hall of Fame.
I know this though. The most famous of American inventors, Thomas Edison said that invention was about inspiration and perspiration, whining was never mentioned. He went on to found the Electrical industry, the Phonographic industry, the Motion Picture business. What business are you starting?
The Wildman
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you when you say that several people should have paid for this fiasco. Certainly a few highly prominent firings at the least, and some probes for negligent homicide might not have been out of hand. And I'm glad that Hubble's been useful, but....
As far as manned flight's usefulness in general, well maybe I an misperceiving your comments, If I am please forgive me, but if we ain't going to settle out in space, start colonizing it, and harvesting the mineral wealth energy abundance, and just plain breathing room it offers then frankly I couldn't care less if the moon is made of green cheese, the stars are little balls of light shining through from heaven, and the Sun revolves around Pluto. At the point that we decide that we don't want to exploit the rest of our system, then learning about it becomes nothing but an exercise in intellectual masturbation. It becomes knowledge that might make a few intellectual elites feel good, entertain and astound a few more outside that clique, and a colossal waste of money for the rest of us. Pure knowledge that is NEVER going to be turned into practical application isn't worth the effort. It might get somebody a university chair somewhere and be good for settling some Oxford Dons argument with his chums, but beyond that I consider its utility pointless.
I think your other points are valid, but the perception I get of your opinion of the relative worth of pure science and astronomy verses manned flight and getting out into the solar system ourselves is completely opposite of my own. Again if I have misperceived it, I apologize, but I'm tired of intellectuals that think the government should be taxing money from people that could be spending it on their own needs, simply to satisfy the intellectuals curiosity on some sterile point about their particular theories of astronomical structure or origins. If that description does not fir you, then again I apologize.
The reason for colonizing Luna and Mars is not science. It is to exploit and use all of the wealth of our system, to expand the collective opportunities for the human race, to challenge our technological ingenuity and provide technological advancement for our society in the feedback, to harness the energy and abundance of all our resources, and in the end - with a little luck and a lot of hard work - give human kind a chance of surviving a single point failure hear on Earth. Hell maybe we can even move our dirty industries to space and clean old Mother Earth up.
If it ain't getting us that, then we're wasting EVERY dime that NASA spends on space and we ought to dump everything that isn't to do with improvements in aeronautical engineering and forget about the rest.
And now you know why I'm often called
The Wildman
Where to begin, where to begin?
Ok, look if Congress overrides this decision then the blame is on them, and you know what? Given that politicians have a wonderous ability to point anywhere else then themselves they won't take that blame. Shawn O'Keefe doesn't have that option. He can't run away or hide if it all goes to Hell in a handcart. He's saddled with an organization that ignored obvious warning signs of a problem (and in my belittled opinion, that was the most signifigant finding of the Review Board) and theres bugger all he can do about it in the short run. So he looked at the manifest list for the shuttles, saw that every single one, except one, was to ISS. Decided that maybe with a year or more to rereview every single thing, have some quiet reassignments of personnel for the more obviously neglectful, and drum one set of procedures for the one set of orbitals and mission procedures that we were going to have to do again, and again, and again, and maybe, just maybe his people might not miss such obvious signs of problems as six inch gashes in protective tiles again. The one lone mission that had signifgantly different parameters, with no safe harbor in case it all went kablooey, got dumped. That was the nuts and bolts of his decision as plainly as he was allowed by political constrants to give it.
As for the board recommendations. True they didn't say "don't go to HST", but they sure did say more then just "have a repair kit handy". Them carbon/carbon edge pieces on the wing fronts were never actually intended to be repaired in space, neither were the silica bricks that make up ninty percent of the rest of the thermal shield. Nobody is really sure if that damn repair kit is worth bupkiss and nobody really wants to put it to the test. This ain't exactly like using a "Fix-a-Flat" kit.
As for scrapping ISS, maybe I wasn't clear, but I gotta say that my sneaky suspicions tell me that nothing would make O'Keefes day more then if he was allowed to. The problem is there is simply no way he can. The ramifications of dunping it are vast (and just 'tween you, me, and the wall, they have very little to do with science. Let me lead you on this one. Take a look at how much of the US manned flight budget is being quietly diverted to the Russian space agency. You gotta read NASA's budget very, very closely to get the right numbers, they've buried it fairly well. ISS is the explanation for a lot of that diversion, the real reason is a litle more convoluted) Leaving that aside, the series of very real commitments we have to numerous nations means we can't unilaterilly terminate it, even if we want to. We owe folks on this one, the previous two administrations, purely in the interests of international brotherhood mind you, made a bunch of commitments to various countries on this, so support it we must. Nah Shawn O'Keefe might want to scrap ISS (and that's just my guess mind you) but there ain't no way he can decide that.
On turn around time at the Cape. Fewer birds means each one flies more often, which means each one has to be serviced more often, each one wears out faster, each one has to be cycled a little faster cause it has to be ready sooner, which means that people stand a better chance of making mistakes, which means, that your risk of going from 3 shuttles down to 2 starts increasing. It makes any delay or problem become even more schedule impacting and things back up more. Argue wither that's 60 or 75 percent imparement, it's still imparement. Quibble me not with the 15 percent when your talking human lives and several Billion dollar investments and unreplaceable launch assets.
To put it bluntly.
IN the end Hubble is just a scope, we didn't have it before it launched and still managed to do good astronomy, we won't have it after it fails and we'll probably manage to continue to do good astronomy without it then too, and even if we do the repair mission that's only another five to seven years of time in a best case scenario), and rather then risk it for that I'd rather deorbit
"In your post, you sound as if it's some huge suprise that there's a risk of death when a shuttle launches. This has always been known. Spaceflight is inherently dangerous."
Yea, but you miss my point. Both these loses were not the result of engineering failure as such. Instead they both came from acceptance of a risk that had been flagged and ignored. When the review board considered the background of this failure it found that the previous 40 plus missions had shown a pattern of increasing tile damage and abrasion, yet NASA had ignored the problem cause it never seemed to cause a problem. That's a management failure of the first order. It's not the shuttle that we have come to see as horrendously more dangerous, it's the whole human decision making team behind it. That was the huge pile of donkey poop Happy Danny Goldin left behind for Shawn O'Keefe to have to deal with, and it's an not a problem he can wave a magic wand at overnight and clean up. What you (and to be fair) everyone else who has posted the same way you have) seems to miss. Is that we don't just haul out a shuttle, stuff some parts aboard, and light the fires. There is an ENOURMAS Human machine that goes into motion planning every single part of every single minute of every single mission NASA flies. The paperwork, checklists, documents and other dreck would fill the VAB if it was all on Dead tree format. And that Machine is very, very, clearlly broken. So Shawn O'Keefe has a problem. He can cancel every single shuttle flight, or he can try and put the bandaids in place to handle one set of orbital requirements that we're going to have to do several times. Trying to put in place enough fixes to deal with the subtly different set of challenges that a Hubble mission (which NASA would be doing only once) simply isn't worth it. If you read carefully what O'Keefe said, that was the jist of it. I assure you, that man is gonna be one sleepless individual every time STS launches. Since it's his head on the chopping block, he made the call, you may not like it, but it was his to make and he did it. Thats why it's called an executive decision, because if he called it wrong we execute him (in something less then a figurative sense, of course)
The Wildman
(Yes ok you are technically correct, but technically the catholic church was correct in saying the universe revolves around the earth. They just used a different frame of reference. :)
I am so glad that someone else has realized this, I was begining to think that I was the only one thatunderstood the implication of Einstein to Theology. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Now I know I'm not the lone weirdo in the universe!
The Wildman
Sure there are astronauts that would do this, and test pilots and jet jocks galore. Fortunately it's not their decision to make. An older and wiser head has looked at the risk (much larger then previously thought) consider the consequences if it went to hell (loss of yet another shuttle, loss of five to seven MORE astronauts, NASA being gutted after Congress and the public scream in outrage about "Why did you ever do such a thing after the Columbia boards recommendations???") and all the various other fall out, and decided the game ain't worth the candle. Look nobody wants to see Hubble fail, and NASA isn't talking about splashing it down tomorrow. It's got a few good years left. The problem is that the upgrades would only keep it going for five to seven years longer then otherwise and it simply isn't worth risking the human lives and cost to the program. The stars and galaxies and all will be there in a dozen years, why not use this sudden outpouring of concern for this myopic bird, to build a better scope and launch it? Why so much sudden attachment to a scope that everybody and I mean EVERYBODY jumped all over as a bat-blind hair-brained piece of junk when it was launched? I mean it's nice to be loved and all, but let's get some perspective. The truth is that it would be much more fun to design and build a better scope and do even better research. I'm not talking James T. Webb here, I mean a new visible light to UV scope, with better resolution and more thought into the science we would like to do, now that we know what kind of science we can do. And build one that doesn't require the Shuttle, because Shuttle is gone once ISS is finished.
We have three shuttles left out of five (which means that we can only do 3/5 of the mission flights we had planned to do every year), we have much more hardware for ISS, which is even more expensive then the repair and replacement parts for Hubble, sitting around in Florida. We have numerous international treaty commitments to our partners, many of whom are supposed to be paid with flight time on ISS for their contributions, which have to be honored. And after the Columbia boards recommendations any NASA administrator that decided to still go ahead with shuttle mission, at those orbital parameters, would be putting himself out on a very long limb, far, far above the ground, and inviting old man Murphy to come along with a saw. Commonsense says "Sorry, but this is a bridge to far." Understand that the game is changed. We got burned once, thought we had learned our mistakes, fixed the obvious problems we saw and went back to flying it. Now we've been burned again, and a LOT of the reasons sound hauntingly familiar. Well fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. NASA manned flight has suddenly gotten VERY, VERY RISK ADVERSE. The idea that "Oh well we fixed these problems, now it's all better" suddenly sounds like a lot of Pollyannaish nonsense. NASA will do what it must with the shuttles, but it will hold its collective breath every time it launches one from now on. Safety is no longer our watchword; it's the ONLY damn thing I hear about nowadays. Congress might vote to override O'Keefe, if they do then on their heads be it. If they do then they better get ready to collectively resign if anything goes wrong, and they better have the letters to the families written in advance, just in case, cause that's what Shawn O'Keefe would have to do if he had made the decision and it went pants, as the Brits say. Those who are so quick to judge aren't the people that will have to explain it to the president, congress, the families, and the general public, until they are, they can darn well be a lot less dogmatic about this. And that's my view for whatever it's worth.
Who knows!
Silicon Valley and the tech revolution wasn't predictable, even major businesses like IBM couldn't foresee what people would ever do with a computer in their homes, a business sure, but a HOME computer?! What would anyone want one of those for? The Internet came out of left field and was considered something nerds and geeks lived on, and was till HTTP caught on and suddenly it took off through the roof. Now programming and hardware are reaching the commodity level and were all running scared. So now were back to having to think up the next area and level of creation. Well here are a few areas, if you're really worried: Bio tech, Nano tech, Materials science, Advanced construction tech, Aerospace, Hydrogen technology, Advanced power systems, Materials recycling, Transport tech, etc.... Getting the idea? I heard these same whines when the Japanese snagged the domestic electronics industry out from under a bunch of slow moving dinosaurs, the same whine when Japan, Germany and Korea started nailing the Auto industry out from under us (they made better built and more reliable vehicles. How unfair of them!). The same whine when the steel industry got nailed, etc, etc, ad nauseum. Life is competition, from the moment you're born, to the moment you die. Competition for food, for mates, for space, for wealth, for everything. Either you can compete for the pie that's already on the table or you can make more pie. Every new tech that's developed, every new industry created, every new job title thought up, is making a bigger pie. Hewlett and Packard; Jobs and Woz; Gates, Allen, and crew; Barden, Shockley and Brattain; Bell; Marconi; Hollorith; Cray; Watson and Crick; etc, etc, etc all made the pie bigger. Try www.invent.org and look through their Hall of Fame. I know this though. The most famous of American inventors, Thomas Edison said that invention was about inspiration and perspiration, whining was never mentioned. He went on to found the Electrical industry, the Phonographic industry, the Motion Picture business. What business are you starting? The Wildman