Shuttle to Launch Despite Objections 314
sam0ht writes "NASA has just named July 1st as the launch date for the space shuttle Discovery, a year after the last shuttle mission. Last July's mission was the first since the break-up of Columbia in 2003, but after foam again broke away from the main tank, the shuttle fleet was grounded. More foam has been removed from the main tank, but NASA staff are divided over whether this is enough to ensure the flight's safety, with some reporting that both the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching again so soon. Managers want to make only one major change at a time, and plan that if damage does occur, the crew would be able to stay in the International Space Station, to which they are delivering supplies, rather than trying to land a damaged shuttle."
Common sense (Score:4, Insightful)
If this thing blows up, guess who're going to be blamed for it?
-:sigma.SB
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
The Shuttle is probably statistically safer then your car.
For christ's sake (Score:4, Informative)
http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/b02
This is the same damn problem they've had since the beginning--only they've continued to make changes without enough testing. The fact that they recently altered the foam is good cause to be even more cautious.
And to the people denouncing the engineers and gov't workers and accountability on this thread, get a clue and pick on another agency. NASA -- the entire agency -- is highly accountable for failed missions from the top on down because it relies on image and public support. The higher ups are accountable to a congress that wants more frequent launches and toys with the budget and priorities--and has a short memory with regard to why we have such a moronic shuttle design. The engineers are doing their job, they did it during columbia, they did it during challenger. In both cases management failed and senior management was fired/retired/encouraged to leave. So spare me the covering-their-asses mentality.
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Interesting)
I grew up in the era when all the shuttle launches were televised and it seemed that every other kid wanted to be an astronaut when they grew up. I was one of those kids and I believed that all the cool science and break-throughs were made by astronauts up in orbit.
However, during college, I realized that the shuttle program is about 95% politics and 5% science. I got an internship within the space program, but in the unmanned satellite area. After college, I continued to work in the area of space sciences
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Interesting)
WTH? That's EXACTLY what I want people to do. People are CHEAP - we have lots and lots of 'em. More than enough to spare sending a few out into space, without having to worry about them.
Personally, I'm in the camp which says "Send men to Mars, but don't give them a way to return." Just keep sending more men, and more equipment, with absolutely no thought to how to get them back. Who cares how to get 'em back? Earth has enough humans! This would make space travel to Mars quite affordable, and possible within just a few years.
Hell, you'd have so many people apply it'd be scary.
In this stupidly politically correct USA-centric world, we have forgotten that exploration IS risky, that science needs volunteers sometimes, and that sometimes those volunteers get hurt, or die. BIG DEAL. Just accept the fact that space is a big bad place, that people will die, and that expensive hardware can go East. This is the way exploration has ALWAYS been. It seems now, however, that people are more concerned about appearances than substance.
It seems like no politician has the guts to stand up and say "Yeah - we're goign to send men to Mars - and we'll worry about how to get them back in 10 years or so. If they're still alive when we are able to retrieve them, that will be a huge scientific triumph for us."
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes, it's indeed somewhat scary. I remember them doing a survey for this
What was worth dying for? (with linebreaks) (Score:4, Interesting)
The development of the personal computer, that might be worth someone dying. Or something of great utility like, I don't know, the automobile. The green revolution. The vaccine for polio. A cure for cancer. If a scientist was killed in a laboratory accident trying to develop one of these things we could eulogize him with "Dr. Bob would be happy to know that he died as he lived, in the service of mankind, and in the cause of something greater than any one of us". Can you name, off the top of your head, any of the "science projects" the Challenger crew was carrying with them? Must have been something of great importance to all mankind to risk 7 lives for, right? Well, lets check the books... Here's what the crew died trying to accomplish:
1) Deploying the Tracking Data Relay-2 satellite, a process which is accomplished dozens of times per year without needing to send humans into space.
2) "Shuttle-Pointed Tool for Astronomy (SPARTAN-203)/Halley's Comet Experiment Deployable, a free-flying module designed to observe tail and coma of Halleys comet with two ultraviolet spectrometers and two cameras." This was a nail developed because we already had a hammer and needed something to bang on -- it could just have easily been done with an unmanned craft (and even if it couldn't, "Pictures of the tail of Halley's Comet" is something mankind can do perfectly fine without).
3) FDE Fluid Dynamics Experiment.
4) Comet Halley Active Monitoring Program CHAMP (see #2, also 100% accomplishable from the ground).
5) Phase Partitioning Experiment (PPE)
6) three Shuttle Student Involvement Program (SSIP) experiments (Now, without discounting the massive contributions to science our high school students provide on a regular basis, I'm guessing that adding low gravity to a science fair project does not result in something worth dying for)
7) a set of lessons for Teacher in Space Project (Just like a regular teacher, except she's in space!)
So, which of these projects was worth someone giving their life for? Or, if you prefer, what project ever accomplished by the shuttle program was worth the cost (heck, ignoring the 2% risk of death of everybody on board there's nothing thats been accomplished that was worth the cost of fuel... examination of the effecs of weightlessness on spider webs? Yaaaay?)
In other time... (Score:3, Insightful)
During mankind's past history, this same stuff was called "colonizing the americas" and "colonizing australia".
Maybe, they'll be still alive.
With luck, they'll be happy to stay there, escaping from the police-state that would have developped b
Re:Common sense (Score:2)
That depends: per mile under power, or per mile coasting?
the shuttle is only under power for a few thousand miles, until it achieves orbit, then for a much shorter distance when it de-orbits. My car has ptobably made 85-90% of its 245,000 km with the engine actively delivering power to the wheels.
Anyone have any stats as to the powered mileage of the average shuttle?
And, by the way, no one has ever died in my car.
Re:Common sense (Score:2)
Good point. But to make this a fair comparison, we need to compare the shuttle to high-end race cars, which are completely re-built between every 'mission'. Otherwise, if you count miles per fatality, under power, between complete overhauls, the average car kicks the shuttle's butt.
Which goes to show how meaningless such statistical comparisons are.
Re:Common sense (Score:2, Interesting)
Something like, for every type of rocket, how many people died for each launching, I think the Shuttles would be pretty good in that comparison... Or, perhaps, compare it to other government jobs, like soldiers for example... Hell, I'd bet that astronauts beat even post
Re:Common sense (Score:4, Funny)
You must be new here. This is slashdot, where car analogies are king.
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Possibly. But "fatality per ride" is kinda high (2%). If you drive your car to work and back, and on weekends to friends and back, then you would be dead, on average, within 1-2 months.
Re:Common sense (Score:4, Funny)
I don't know about that. Most shuttle trips are pretty short: They start at one of the Kennedy Space Center's launch pads, and they disembark just a couple of miles away at the shuttle's runway.
Not So Much, No (Score:5, Interesting)
However, this is really stacking the deck in the shuttle's favor. If you want to be technical about it, my bicycle hurtled hundreds of thousands of miles through space on my morning commute this morning... relative to the position of the sun. Granted, relative to the position of my house the displacement was only about two miles. Almost all of the mileage wracked up by the shuttle was it coasting around orbiting, when the only thing it had to accomplish was "don't spontaneously explode or have every life support system fail at once". If you want to compare times when the shuttle was actually under directed movement (and a realistic likelihood of danger), which would be essentially limited to lift-off and flying back to earth with some very minor positional adjustments once you're in orbit, the shuttle is many millions of times more dangerous than a car. Some back of the envelope math: the trip to orbit is about 200 miles, the trip down the same, and we'll be VERY generous and say the shuttle travels another 100 miles once its up there in positioning changes and whatnot. Thats a total of 500 miles per trip. There have also been 114 shuttle missions over the course of the space program. Thats one death per 4,000 miles. If cars were that much of a deathtrap we'd expect about 450,000 traffic fatalities in 1994. There were about 43,000 last year.
Bonus points: if you charge the deaths to alcohol instead of cars (hey, the cars would have been perfectly safe if the guy hadn't been driving drunk -- thats like charging a passenger airplane for fatalities if it gets hit with a missile), roughly half of the car fatalities vanish. Presumably the shuttle program does not have an alcohol problem.
You're right. What a difference a comma makes... (Score:3, Informative)
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/ [dot.gov]
Re:Common sense (Score:2)
To be honest, if you're measuring it by the mile, the highways are the safest place to drive. Sure, it's safer just sitting in your driveway, but it's not useful that way. The most dangerous part of shuttle/car rides is the beginning and ending. For cars this would be th
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Interesting)
Nobody who works for the government will do anything, sign anything, and it's completely frustrating being an outside joe like myself who has a job to do. Although, I learned how to work the
Re:Common sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Why companies can't just give people incentives to relase code when it is ready and not before or after I can't understand...
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is that if somebody is only going to get beat up if the launch fails, and there is no penalty for unnecessarily cancelling a launch, then you're going to get nothing but no-go decisions. These engineers are working in government posts - the only way they lose their job is if they mess up. A mess up is defined as an exploding space shuttle. A deorbiting ISS is also a mess up, but in a different department. Therefore the shuttle support engineers are best off just leaving the thing on the pad while they tinker with designs until retirement.
I'm sure many or most of the engineers dont' have this attitude outright - but the incentives are probably aligned this way - so deadlock is going to be the way things go until the shuttle is retired...
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
Suppose you say 'yes,' the Shuttle goes up and disaster happens. You're to blame.
Suppose you say 'yes,' the Shuttle goes up and everything is fine. No one cares.
Suppose you say 'no,' the Shuttle goes up and everything is fine. No repercussions.
Suppose you say 'no,' the Shuttle goes up and disaster happens. You were right all along.
Obviously, looking at a cost/benefit analysis, if y
Re:Common sense (Score:4, Insightful)
Not really.
It's just that by various laws, we (government employees) can't take that responsibility.
Take your average government contract. Of the government side people working on the contract or with the contracted group, a very small subset of them are actually authorized and allowed to make changes no matter how much sense there may be to make those changes. The average government employee may be held liable for a stop work order or a contract change, when they don't have the authority to make it. So yeah, there is some passing of the buck in that regard.
And yeah, there are idiots like you describe who pull a 4 hour day and fill out a time card for 8 hours. But I saw the same thing in the private sector, and worse. At least government side, the people I work with know what we have, so they don't end up ordering a bunch of stuff that walks out the door as soon as it gets shipped in.
But, at least in my small part of the government world, we come in when the job demands. If that means working over holidays, pulling a 24 hour day or more, or whatever is needed to make the fleet go, then we do it.
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
The same people who will be recognized in the silence of obscurity if the mission goes off flawlessly.
grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
Space is dangerous, expensive, and offers very few good opportunities. If you want to get anywhere you have to take risks. I'm not saying that people should just throw their lives away for nothing, but every trip they make into space breaks new ground and teaches them new lessons. If you want the rewards you have to be prepared to walk away with a bloddy nose now and again, especially in a game like this.
It may be harsh, but I would say that if they are trying to make space travel 100% safe, it's just plain never going to happen. Right now I think we should be happy with 90%. From a purely practical perspective, if a dozen people lose their lives to accellerate the space program 10 years, I would call that a good trade. And I'd be happy to be one of those 12.
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
The crew know what they signed up for, probably better than any other explorer ever has. But knowing the normal risks they run isn't the same as asking them to go up when they know the thing that brought the shuttle down last time hasn't been fixed!
Re:grow a pair (Score:4, Insightful)
It may not strike a chunk of foam, but hey, it might smack a big old bird on the way up, ro get nicked by a meteorite or some space-junk.
They are going up this time with a contingency plan to possibly repair such damage after it happened, but it's always going to be dangerous.
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, it's perfectly dangerous, but there's no reason to make it worse by not performing your due dilligence, and building a spaceworthy craft. Yes, there are going to be problems, but there's something to be said for learning from your mistakes.
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:2)
My opinion pertains to troubleshooting a problem, and the ability or willingness to take the time to fix the problem correctly, in order to increase the productivity of the program in a safe manner. It would seem that others disagree with my position, and say that the crew are prepared to take the r
Is it an *inherent* design flaw? (Score:3)
It may be cheaper in the long run to replace the shuttle but I haven't seen enough discussion of the alternatives to know tha
Re:grow a pair (Score:4, Informative)
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Interesting)
This particular team is an institutionalized bureaucracy. Their pay is the same whether they fly or not. Not flying is substantially easier and safer. They are mostly just trying to preserve their jobs until CRV or some other program comes along to which they can all be transfered and which point CRV will become extraordinarily expensive jobs program with a poor track record.
There is actually somewhat greater job security in flying infrequently, and stretching out how long it takes to finish the ISS, because when they finish the 16 flights or whatever their careers are over unless their is a big new project to transfer to, i.e. CRV and the return to the Moon. They just have to be careful that they don't frustrate the politicians that pay them to the point they pull the plug on them prematurely. Not flying in the name of safety is the safest methodology.
The Shuttle payroll stays the same, yet their flight rate has reached a truly glacial pace since Columbia. I sure would be curious to see what the actual cost per flight has been for the last flight and this one. I'm guessing probably in the $5-10 billion range per flight, and these two missions have accomplished nothing beyond hauling supplies to the ISS which should have been done with a cheap, expendable booster. Though when we spend $8 billion a month on Iraq to no obvious good end, I guess $5 billion isn't so bad. But still, we spend so little money on space and technology(outside weapons) you are left wishing the dollars we do spend were spent more wisely than to just keep jobs going in Texas and Florida for political reasons. I assure you whenever NASA's budget comes up the jobs program it drives is way more important to the politicians that fund them than are what they actually accomplish which is why the manned program has a huge payroll and accomplished very little. NASA kind of needs to be like a corporation, where either you succeed or you go under. The way it is now they can fail and just keep failing.
The basic problem with our space program is their is no objective, there is no goal, there is nothing to reach where there will be celebration and a sense of accomplishment. At this point the objective is just to kind of keep the shuttle from another catastrophic failure and kind of half finish the ISS. At that point there is a 50/50 chance success will be declared and then they will have to figure out how to abandon the ISS safely since it sucks money out of more worthwhile endeavors, and does next to nothing useful.
At this point getting getting a life boat colony on Mars, mining asteroids, or finding a new energy source are the only objectives that really excite enough to justify manned presence.
Getting a permanent colony on Mars would be priceless. It would teach us a lot about ourselves and our society, compell innovation and give people who hunger for a frontier a place to go, and there are always people hungry for a frontier.
At the rate our exploding population is exhausting both mineral and energy resources on our home planet, starting to explore space alternatives would be worth doing though it will be a long time before they will be viable. When we start running out of minerals having asteroid mining proved will be priceless.
Re:grow a pair (Score:2)
Re:grow a pair (Score:3, Insightful)
Declaring stuff impossible isn't the kind of attitude you need to do hard things.
Two words.... Space elevator.
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Interesting)
IMO: when it comes to "accelerating the program" I don't think it matters so much what experiments they're doing so much as how they're getting them up there.
The U.S. manned space program went from 'nothing' to 'shuttle' in about 21 years (1960-1981), 'nothing' to 'moon' in about 8 years, did 'moon' for three-plus years, did 'Skylab' for only SIX MONTHS, has been running at 'shuttle' for the last 25 years, was stuck at 'o-rings' for two-plus years, and has been stuck at 'foam' for the last three years.
Where has 'acceleration' been 'lately'?
Re:grow a pair (Score:3, Funny)
Probably "hiding" between a pair of "apostrophes".
Re:grow a pair (Score:3, Insightful)
Because nothing kicks a country in the ass like a perceived enemy they want to outdo. CF. the "Space Race", which only happened because of a gargantuan pissing contest between two big countries.
Which by the way, is a fantastic thing, despite a negative name like "pissing contest". When it comes down to it, a technological show-off pissing contest is a lot better thing than a war. Think how many lives would have been spa
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Interesting)
I take it you are unaware that Von Braun was under constant pressure for being too slow, too much a perfectionist and too insistant that everything be as close to just right as we could make it before he would agree to light the fuse?
In fact he drove the "let's just plug ahead and get this baby done" folks nuts with his attitude that we should "just plug ahead and get this baby done right".
Understand that at that point in time he had seen, and even been personally responsible for, more launch failures than any man alive
KFG
von Braun and risk management (Score:5, Interesting)
I highly recommend the new von Braun biography, "Dr. Space".
One thing NASA has forgotten from his legacy is the need for absolute honesty in engineering. He rewarded people for coming forward and admitting screwups even when they might have been blamed for loss of a vehicle.
Honesty, safety margins, and a culture of "there's no such thing as 'sort of' working" give you machines that work and that don't kill people. Von Braun's team designed the Saturn first stage. It's entertaining to calculate the total energy that was stored in one of those, and divide it by c squared. 300 milligrams. All released in a few minutes. Von Braun's team made that work safely and successfully every single time.
Re:grow a pair (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:2)
1) The rewards from the shuttle program aren't particularly great. We live in an age of computers and robotics, so it seems to me that developing automated systems to do basic things like satellite repairs would be a logical use for the dollars currently used to send humans on routine missions. Apollo at least had romance and glory t
Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:5, Funny)
Ignoring engineers hasn't got the Shuttle very far in the past. From the Challenger Wikipedia article:
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:5, Insightful)
1. cut funding
2. ignore the engineers and launch anyhow
3. blame the engineers when something goes wrong
4. State the problem is not what even high-school dropouts suspect is the problem
5. Ignore the engineers for weeks until it becomes patently obvious to even idiots that the problem engineers warned about and laypersons expected was the problem IS the problem
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:3, Interesting)
They may have once been engineers, in a former life, but once you get that cushy government paycheck, your job becomes "not being held accountable for stuff".
It's no accident that "the lead engineer and top safety official are against launching".
BTW, it may seem I've contradicted myself, but "lead engineer" doesn't imply any actual engineering any more than "software project lead" implies that the guy could cobble together a four-line vb script.
They a
First rule of Shuttle Flight Club (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:4, Insightful)
sweet (Score:4, Funny)
Each time the shuttle goes to the ISS I get new wallpaper.
That might be just about the best thing to come out of the ISS program. *sigh*
Re:sweet (Score:2)
Wallpaper (Score:2)
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station
See?
Nice, expensive wallpaper.
A somewhat less alarmist version of the story: (Score:5, Informative)
Two senior NASA managers - chief engineer Chris Scolese and Bryan O'Conner, the associate administrator of Safety and Mission Assurance - did have concerns over the potential risk of foam debris posed by a number of insulated ice frost ramps along Discovery's external tank, NASA officials said.
About 34 foam-covered ice frost ramps line the shuttle fuel tank, insulating brackets that connect a cable tray and pressurization line.
"From their particular discipline, they felt they wanted their statement to be No-Go," William Gerstenmaier, NASA's associate administrator for space operations said. "But they do not object to us flying and they understand the reasons and the rationale that we laid out in the review for flight."
Re:A somewhat less alarmist version of the story: (Score:3, Interesting)
Can anyone understand this?
How can "No-Go" and "do not object to us flying" possibly be true at the same time?
Good! (Score:5, Interesting)
If we wait for everything to be 100% iron-clad safe, we'll never leave this rock.
There's always going to be a nay-sayer somewhere up the chain. Beurocrats get so uptight about their jobs that that they'd never greenlight anything, for fear of being accountable for something (feds are 100% allergic to accountability, anyone who's ever worked a government contract will know this).
Godspeed and have some fun up there.
Bad! (Score:5, Informative)
Every time the Shuttle flies, we fall about six months further behind where we could be. We still have not started to think about replacing it with a system that will deliver reliable, inexpensive and frequent access to space. The capsule replacement on the drawing board won't be inexpensive and it won't fly frequently. It's a stop-gap measure to provide access to the International Space Station, assuming the Shuttle can fly without disaster something like 18 more times to finish the construction. That is definitely not certain. The loss of only one more orbiter -- even in a ground accident as has nearly happened -- will make it all but impossible to finish construction of the ISS.
If you think human and other activity in space is important then you should be in favor of immediate cancellation of the Shuttle program. I don't know what sort of wake-up call that Congress and NASA need to get the hint, but we really need to start working on a next generation system right now.
Re:Bad! (Score:4, Interesting)
We are [popularmechanics.com], and quoth that article: "The winning concept will be chosen in 2008, and the manned vehicle flown in 2014."
But, in the meantime, the Shuttle is all we got, and we should use it, rather than waiting until 2014 to go back up into space.
What if Lewis and Clark waited for the railroad to be built before heading West because canoes and horses were too risky?
CEV is only a stop-gap (Score:2)
Re:CEV is only a stop-gap (Score:2)
That's what they said about the space shuttle. Originally, they planned for a 2 week turn around with the shuttle. All things being perfect, they might be able to pull this off, although I don't think it has ever happened, or ever will happen. I also don't think there's enough demand to launch 2 shuttles a month.
Re:CEV is only a stop-gap (Score:4, Interesting)
But there would have been, if shuttle launches were actually as cheap as they were supposed to be!
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Knee jerk (Score:2)
And I'm not saying that only because I'm an engineer. :-)
Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Finally! (Score:4, Interesting)
What exactly is it the ISS is doing that makes it worth keeping alive, especially when its diverting billions of dollars from all those new things you list, so they mostly aren't happening?
Whenever people start lobbying in favor of the ISS I generally ask what has the ISS done that justifies the price tag, the zero G physiology research simply doesn't. The Russians did far more for far less on Mir, and still today the gist of it seems to be intensive exercise helps fight the effects of zero G. Not sure that really justifies a $100 billion price tag. I'm sure you can dig up some esoteric research done on the ISS but I assure you, you could could have gotten far better research spending the $100 billion elsewhere.
Someone also always says its crucial practice for taking the next step. With this I guess I can agree, it has been an invaluable lesson in how not to run a large space project.
Re:Finally! (Score:2)
About the only thing Shuttle and ISS have done is keep on life support a manned aerospace industry and kept a small cadre of aerospace e
Indirect investment in ISS, Management Decisions (Score:5, Interesting)
Time and time again NASA illustrates the things that can go perfectly right and horribly wrong when engineers and pioneers are held accountable to politicians via managers/beauracrats.
Sometimes it works. Kennedy told them to put a man on the moon, and they did it. They were tasked in the 70's with making a reusable spacecraft, they did pretty good for a first project, especially getting it to last damn near 30 years. Then in the 80's they were tasked with long term space visits, had some help with that, but got it done still.
Now the managers are no longer managing but worrying about political decisions. Without good management the actual work stalls as the geeks don't know what to work and jump ship.
I'm torn as to how to resolve this. I don't want public money going to private companies, nor do I want to see it squandered in a dinosaur of an organization.
At the very least acknowledge that NASA has some issues and see what we can do to ease any restrictions against private companies moving into orbit and sharing with them research that was done with public money at NASA.
Re:Indirect investment in ISS, Management Decision (Score:5, Insightful)
Spending money on the ISS is a good thing.
Why? The ISS is going to cost US taxpayers in excess of $100 billion, to boldly sit where Skylab has sat before. Since we don't currently have a reliable manned booster to rotate crew on and off the station (having trashed the working, reliable, relatively inexpensive and more powerful Apollo launcher for the unreliable, outrageously expensive Shuttles), or a reliable means of emergency escape, the ISS is limited to 3 crewmembers on a longterm basis. That's barely enough staff to keep the station running, which means there's virtually no science taking place aboard the station.
I say abandon the ISS now, along with the Shuttles, and divert those tens of billions of dollars into designing and building a state-of-the-art launcher utilizing the lessons learned from the successful Apollo program and those parts of the Shuttle program (such as the engines) which have proven worthwhile. Or spend that money on researching and developing tech which could dramatically lower the cost of access to space, such as carbon nanotube structures or new propulsion technologies. Either would be a far better use of taxpayer money than the useless ISS or the expensive, unreliable Shuttle, which I believe are now up to a billion dollars a launch, making them the most expensive launcher ever by a wide margin. We could launch fleets of astronauts into space aboard Russia's safer Soyuz booster for the price of a single Shuttle launch. Like the ISS, the Shuttle is a crippled dog and needs to be put out of its (and our) misery.
Re:Indirect investment in ISS, Management Decision (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah we do; it's called the Soyuz. There's no reason why we can't just build a bunch of them instead of continuing to launch overgrown school buses at the thing!
See, that's the big problem with NASA. They're stuck in this stupid mentality where they think they either have to use the Shuttle or design something brand new and impossibly perfect. That's a false dichotomy. Any replacement for the Shuttle doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to be better than the Shuttle. Freakin Apolllo fits that description; they could just build some more of those! And all they'd have to do is change the shape of the hatch to be compatible with the ISS and run the sucker off a graphing calculator instead of the heavy 60's-era computer technology.
Kill it now. (Score:5, Insightful)
The Space Shuttle or STS will never by safe (Score:2, Interesting)
The main reasons that killed the shuttle was safely, costs, lost of life and other payload rockets like the Ariane, Atlas and so on. I think a few years from now SpaceX will have most control over payload rockets.
Re:The Space Shuttle or STS will never by safe (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The Space Shuttle or STS will never by safe (Score:3, Insightful)
Make the managers ride along (Score:2)
Re:Make the managers ride along (Score:2)
eject (Score:2, Interesting)
What's the Problem Lately? (Score:5, Insightful)
What's happened? Did we redesign something? Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with? Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to? I haven't seen anything to tell me why it seems we can't launch a shuttle without something faling off when the old ones flew without a publicized hitch.
Anyone?
Re:What's the Problem Lately? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes. Most of Shuttle's electronics had been upgraded, probably more than once.
Are they so old that the parts are wearing out and we can't replace them as well as we built them to begin with?
Yes. It was reported many times that they found cracks in these cryogenic tubes, in those control wires, in that RSS panel, and so on. That is on top of regularly scheduled replacement of parts. Some of these parts can not be made exactly as they were made 30 years ago. Metals and alloys changed, CNC mills changed, cooling oil for those mills changed, milling bits' material changed - and all that can affect everything. Worse with electronic parts - you can't buy today many components that were mainstream 5 years ago - they are not made any more, fabs ripped apart and upgraded to new technology. So you need that old i80186 silicon rev B2 ? Tough luck.
Are we just publicizing problems more now than we used to?
Probably so. NASA top echelons graduated from engineering to politics, and when an engineer would be searching for a technical solution these folks are searching for a PR solution, as if one can talk a machine into not failing.
Re:What's the Problem Lately? (Score:2)
What happened is that we realized what the real risks are. There are several failure scenarios which we had irrationally hoped were one-in-a-h
Re:What's the Problem Lately? (Score:3, Informative)
It's probably more accurate to say that the public's ignorance is bliss. Only the public has been, by and large, ignorant of these problems. The engineers knew about all of them right away and made sure to inform management who then did little.
I just finished reading Mik
This ain't the NASA of the moonshot (Score:5, Insightful)
Now, this changed big time. NASA gets the people it can afford, it gets the equipment the contractors that bid lowest and offer the best counter-contracts offer, they receive funding whenever something's left from the bomb budget and they have to deal with environmental restrictions and people complaining about the noise of their testing facilities.
Space flight has turned from a prestige object into a business. It has to try to be profitable. Now, it is VERY hard to actually be directly profitable in manned space flight. The moonshot did boost economy and quickened development in many, military as well as civilian, areas, especially we, in the IT biz, would be far from where we're today without the space program.
But today, everything, even science, has to be profitable. That's the big problem with the NASA today. They aren't "worse" than they were in the 60s, they don't slack or work more sluggish. It's just not space race time anymore.
Re:This ain't the NASA of the moonshot (Score:4, Funny)
Re:This ain't the NASA of the moonshot (Score:3, Insightful)
Rollout Pictures (Score:5, Interesting)
ice ramps (Score:4, Interesting)
My problem is, I think there should be a skeleton crew on these test flights.
Looking forward to seeing ISS completed and shuttle retired. On to the constellation program!
By the way, ISS can have many uses. eg. researching how full a liquid fuel tank is in space. ( or any liquid tank ) There are numerous research possibilities -- just requires some imagination and real problems...
Anyhow, if the shuttle does blow then its over for the shuttle. That is right from the administrators mouth.
What O/S does NASA use? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:What O/S does NASA use? (Score:2)
Your digital rights have been revoked. Have a nice day. Ker-pow!
they have pushed their luck enough (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:they have pushed their luck enough (Score:3, Insightful)
They need fuel to stay there - you can't "park" them in low earth orbit and expect them to stay there for long, and you can't get them to go any higher due to the same fuel problems. You could put a big tank full of fuel in the cargo bay and have that as payload with some sort of hack to feed that into the main tank - but they are not currently designed to stay up for long. I find the design of the thing hanging off the side of the launcher really bizzare in the first place
Sounds like Dilbert (Score:2)
The top guys who know what they're doing KNOW it's a bad idea, but management says do it anyway.
Said management is definately looking a little pointy-haired.
Re:Sounds like Dilbert (Score:3, Funny)
No, I don't believe that. It was 23 years ago when the Challenger exploded. The people in charge now are the children of the management 23 year ago.
There's gota be a name for this, perhaps nepodilbertism.
Rocket to Nowhere (Score:2, Informative)
A quote: "Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearl
Stay in the space station? (Score:2)
Astronauts: So we're safely out of the damaged ship, so how do we get back now?
Ground Control: Dunno, we only make 1 large change at a time.
This is the right decision (Score:3, Insightful)
What I do see happening is a return to the traditional capsule like format. It could even be done in a reusable format MUCH easier and less prone to problems then the shuttle. We have to keep in mind....space is different. We can't send airplanes into space. We have to send spacecraft into space.
NASA - Nothing About Safety Afterall (Score:3, Interesting)
My early work experience was very similar to the business of space travel. I worked on high performance fighter aircraft. You had to focus very hard on safety and doing your job right because the danger level was already higher than most people see in their lives. On top of that, I was an armament systems specialist which means that I worked with things intended to blow up or otherwise kill people. Usually these devices were intended to kill large quantities of people or destroy very large and heavily armored vehicles or buildings. Safety was therefore extremely important because you didn't want one of these things going boom at the wrong time or place. Our goal was in fact to have the pilots fly around with these things and bring them back to us in one piece not having killed or destroyed anything. If/when we pulled that off it was A Good Thing(TM) . We were told, and I have witnessed, that if we took the time to do our jobs safely we would be doing them faster and at less cost than if we threw caution to the wind. Yes, I said that I have witnessed it.
Safety was preached to us all day, every day. We began each day with a mission briefing, a prayer and a safety briefing. On the flightline we started every load with a safety briefing. At the end of the day we debriefed so that we might learn from the experience and be more safe tomorrow. If, at any step of the operation, anyone thought conditions were unsafe, they would speak up and everything stopped until the situation was corrected. It didn't matter if the person crying safety was a general or the newest airman fresh out of tech school and wet behind the ears. The fact that I ended my enlistment with all of my limbs is a testament to this culture of safety. When you consider the dangers involved....it's pretty darn mindblowing.
If you compare tactical fighter operation with shuttle operation, the danger levels are very similar. Why then do we have NASA willing to launch a shuttle despite their top people saying it is unsafe to do so? When the engineers are saying "STOP", why is the mission allowed to proceed?
This is not the first time that NASA has had a disregard for safety. In fact it's something of a way of life for them. Remember the Apollo 1 disaster and the hatch that couldn't be opened by the astronauts? And that's not the first such stupid unsafe act they were involved in. NASA and the CIA have always had this acceptable risk culture as part of their flight operations.
The military has a culture of safety and, although their jobs are extremely dangerous, they do not believe in acceptable risk. The military is always working to make their jobs safer. NASA, on the other hand, has a culture of acceptable risk. They seem to figure that their jobs are dangerous and that's just the way it is. I'm thinking NASA could learn quite a bit from DoD. Yes, I actually typed that.
If we're ever going to get off this rock, space travel has to become safe. If we're ever going to use space to our advantage it has to become affordable, and that means we can't be accepting high risk all the time. Therefore this culture of acceptable risk is holding back our space program.
The Russians don't have the safest space program around but they sure have a cheaper space program that is just as active. The Soviets, when they ran the show, had a hell of a lot of stupid accidents. Then again, they have never spent the kind of
Re:Chemical rocketry is lame (Score:2)
Re:Chemical rocketry is lame (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Install small nets? (Score:2)
LOL!
Oh, sorry. You were serious? There's a thing called laminar flow which tends to be disturbed by thousands of little nets. These nets also need to be made of some material with extremely high tensile strength so they don't just rip apart in the airstream. Oh and to make matters worse, what happens when your "net" actually "catches" a piece of debris? The piece of hull where the net is at