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
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: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:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
The Shuttle is probably statistically safer then your car.
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!
Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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: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:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Common sense (Score:5, Insightful)
Kill it now. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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:Rules of Shuttle Flight (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:grow a pair (Score:2, Insightful)
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 you say 'yes,' either no one will care or you'll be in trouble. If you say 'no,', either (a) no one will care or you'll be a hero.
Gee, I think I'd say 'no', too.
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: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:The Space Shuttle or STS will never by safe (Score:3, Insightful)
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: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.
Re:they have pushed their luck enough (Score:3, Insightful)
I suppose the answer is to let rocket scientists design the next one and not a committee of politicians. The committee should be there to say - "it should get this high, carry this much, we want it in ten years plus whatever, and we don't want it to cost more than this amount if you can help it" then go away. None of this garbage micromanagement of insisting that different parts get built in different areas for the purpose of generating votes which resulted in a design change that killed people - the proirity should not be votes for the party that dominates to committee but building a working vehicle.
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: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 spared if the Allies had had a space race vs. Germany instead of WWII.
I'm really hoping the US can have a space race vs. China instead of WWIII!
Because China is going to pass the US economy sooner than most people realize, and technologically not long behind that. Usually when one nation surpasses the dominant country it means war. Maybe this time it will mean dudes on Mars instead.
Re:If science is worth dying for... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:CEV is only a stop-gap (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:This ain't the NASA of the moonshot (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Common sense (Score:3, Insightful)
The same people who will be recognized in the silence of obscurity if the mission goes off flawlessly.
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 by then accross the occident on Earth. (and becoming the *new* land of the free).
With more luck, after a couple of centuries, they'll manage to become the new cultural and economic super-power.
And then, most probably, several decades later, they'll start to protect their corporation, abuse their new patent system, waive personnal freedoms in the name of planetary security, be constantly affraid of imaginary "pedo-terrorist-pirate" that reportedly posses anti-matter weapons, declare wars against anyone standing in the way, etc...
Only this time, the catapult-over-the-mexican-border will be a little bit more complicated to do.
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.