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."
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.
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 system... Everytime some dinkus stands in my way, for instance: I had to have an escort at one federal site, my escort chose to show up for work at 11:30, and look at his watch around 2 PM and say "lets call it a day", I say fine and ask them to sign a stop-work order... Asking them to put their name on something, in ink, why, why, why, thats accountability!! It works every time (the guy I mentioned had to work 8 hour days for the first week in his life, "work" of course meant sitting there googling the intarweb while I did work)
What was my point? Oh yeah, if it's govt employees doing the whining, they're safe to ignore.
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.
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:Common sense (Score:1, Interesting)
You have no clue what you are talking about. Out of 114 launches, there have been 2 disasters. That's like a 2% fatality rate. That is very high. I don't think these sort of figures would be exceptable for a car. (chech wikipedia and other source if you don't believe me).
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 aren't against the launch, they just voiced some concerns, so when it blows up, and people come to them with questions, they can say "see! see! somebody elses fault".
Like everything else that goes wrong in America, if there's an accident, it will all somehow be Bush's fault. After all, the guy didn't even prevent Hurricane Katrina from hitting New Orleans, the rat bastard! (Not only that, he hasn't even announced a comprehensive plan to prevent hurricanes from hitting the coast again!)
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: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: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'?
eject (Score:2, Interesting)
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
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?
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.
they have pushed their luck enough (Score:5, Interesting)
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 and now I have several missions under my belt. Having seen how things work from the inside, the majority of good science comes from our unmanned satellites that don't make the news and the majority of the public don't even know about. While there are certain scientific benefits that the shuttle program has brought, the majority of the shuttle program has been a public relations campaign and politics.
While I already believed that every precaution should be taken before sending the shuttle back up, I want NASA to make extra sure that every precaution really has been made because we are risking people's lives in the name of politics and public relations. Don't get me wrong, I don't want people to risk their lives in the name of science or exploration either, but there will always be some risk in exploration. There shouldn't be any risk (with respect to people's lives) just to play politics and get nice photos of Americans and Russians together in orbit.
I don't want to see the manned program disappear. But I do want to see NASA be as responsible as they can be. I don't know where the "acceptable risk" falls, but I sure hope it's really low.
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 postal workers for lowest per-capita death rate. Or is that kill rate?
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: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
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.
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?)
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.
cognitive dissonance regarding bureaucrats (Score:1, Interesting)
I'm confused however by your defense of the leader of the pack of not-accountable bureaucrats.
I suppose you may be suffering cognitive dissonance [wikipedia.org] and not even realize it. In any case you have employed a straw man [wikipedia.org] logical fallacy in support of your position (misrepresenting the position of your debate opponent). Bush is not responsible for the Hurricane. His many public critics such as Paul Krugman (economist and New York Times columnist) have not claimed that preventing the hurricane from hitting New Orleans was his, to use a phrase popular with Bush, "job."
Krugman and other critics have said, however, that appointing someone with no relevant experience of any kind to head FEMA led directly to a dramatic reduction in the ability of the agency to respond to a crisis, measured against past performance. FEMA under the Clinton administration was one of the most highly regarded of federal agencies. FEMA under Bush is the butt of jokes: Federal Emergency My Ass, et. al.
Within the last week it was revealed by Congressional audit to have mismanaged the Katrina relief so badly that as much as $1.4 Billion (with a B) dollars have been wasted. Nearly as many people died as the result of Katrina as from the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Most of those people drowned. They drowned because the apparatus of the federal government ignored warnings, failed to prepare, and then was unable to offer the timely assistance that the tax paying citizens of this country expect and paid for. How can you possibly bring up Katrina in defense of Bush? It's completely insane to do that.
Bush wants everyone to believe that he's a great manager, but the evidence is pretty clear -- he sucks. He was an utter failure in every business endeavor he ever participated in. In a matter of a few short years he turned the country around, and it's now on a beeline course headed into the ground, racking up debt that your grandchildren will be paying for their entire lives. Do you feel good about that? I don't. I don't even have kids and I don't want *your* kids saddled with this kinda pointless and stupid debt. Bush is the worst manager we have had running the country for such a long period of time that only historians are qualified to debate whether or not Bush is The Worst President Evar (TM).
Bush supports the space program during the occasional speech where he thinks he's going to pick up a few votes from the "hope for the future" space enthusiast and Star Trek set. You seem to be keenly interested in the space program. How can you not see through Bush's cynical ruse?
Wake up.
P.S. This is not a personal criticism, merely friendly advice: Learn to spell "bureaucrat", your criticisms will be more effective.
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?
Re:A somewhat less alarmist version of the story: (Score:1, Interesting)
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:Not quite (Score:1, Interesting)
In light of what happened at CDC, I have nothing but disgust for the man. As to the apology, He was simply an actor delivering a good performance (Based on his movies, I would sat that this was perhaps the best that he had). Think of how Clinton came off during his apology. Also another actor.