Safe Landing For Space Shuttle Discovery

dylanduck writes "Discovery is back safe and sound, despite minor problems with a leaky power unit and a last minute change of approach direction to the runway. The mission tested some post-Columbia safety changes, and also set up the space station for future construction. But in some ways, the tough job starts now - NASA has just 40 days or so to get Atlantis up."

Nice

[9x320]

I can't wait for the next mission [wikipedia.org].

Re:Welcome back!

[mrxak]

Don't forget the Hubble servicing missions. If those don't happen, we'll be without our pretty pictures for several years before the next orbiting telescope is up and running.

Re:Good news indeed

[mrxak]

A 2% failure rate is to be expected, and that's what we've got. Right now they're being over-cautious and it's slowing up everything the Shuttle was supposed to do. Space exploration is dangerous. We can't let a couple of accidents throw away everything we've worked for. But I am looking forward to a new vehicle, that is for sure. I just hope we don't stop the Shuttle missions before any new vehicle is ready.

...the tough job starts now...

[Mondoz]

The tough job starts now?
Not really... The other orbiters are processed in separate buildings, by separate groups of technicians.
After Columbia, each flight requires a 'backup' orbiter be available to rescue the crew, should an emergency arise, so Atlantis is already nearly flight-ready.
The processing of Atlantis and the training of the next crew has been underway for quite some time.
It's not like KSC can only process one orbiter at a time...

definitely

[peter303]

This was one of the fears of a too-long gap between shuttle visits. ISS needs a shuttle-assisted orbit boost at least every other year.

Re:Orbital Decay?

[helioquake]

I don't think the Discovery pushed the ISS's orbit higher in this mission, but NASA indeed uses the Shuttle to do that.

We are approaching another Solar minimum. It is a good thing since Earth's atmosphere doesn't puff up too much during the minimum period, hence reducing the level of drag onto the ISS (hence less decay in its orbit).

Re:Orbital Decay?

[cyclone96]

Are the shuttle dockings ever used to give the ISS a slight nudge to counteract a decaying orbit?

The change in the orbit from the docking itself is negligible (since the shuttle and station are in essentially the same orbit at docking - the closing rate at docking is ~ 0.1 feet/second).

That being said, the shuttle is occasionally used to reboost the Space Station by using up the excess shuttle propellant onboard. Additionally, in certain attitudes when the shutte is in attitude control the attitude control jets just happen to be pointed the correct direction to boost it slightly as well.

This is all secondary to the Progress resupply ships, which are the main mode of performing reboosts.

"old" airframes

[dpilot]

Don't forget the good old B-52. Half a century and those things are still flying. I suspect there's been a lot of learning since, "No Highway in the Sky."

Re:Good news indeed

[gfxguy]

But planes "have killed many more than that" in how many millions of flights?

The catstrophic failure rate for planes is absolutely miniscule.

So you and I know it, but there's a lot of people out there who are scared to fly, but not scared to drive P.O.S. cars with bad brakes and bald tires in the pouring rain during rush hour.

Statistics don't matter to some people - but a large scale emotionally charged event does.

Re:Good news indeed

[Teancum]

A couple point to note:

The idea of a "spaceport" is hardly new. In fact, it was proposed by none other than Werner Von Braun as his preferred method of getting to the Moon. Had it been built, there would have been real infrastructure for continued Lunar excursions rather than the glory missions we now know as Apollo, and many more than 12 men would have been able to walk on the Moon in the 20th Century, with only another dozen getting into circumlunar orbit. And it would have been much "cheaper" to send yet another mission to the Moon, with potentially vehicle reuse for return trips to the Moon. Fuel tenders could certainly be sent up unmanned at comparatively cheap prices in terms of cost/lb. Imagine, you wouldn't even have to supply a payload faring or any other gear other than just spacecraft navigation equipment and a few connectors to pull the fuel out after it gets to orbit. This is done, BTW, with the ISS already and was done successfully with MIR by the Russians.

One of the things to keep in mind, in addition to the significantly reduced atmospheric drag on spacecraft in LEO, you also have (usually) very high velocity that isn't that much more to simply reach escape velocity. The rockets used to push satellites to GEO aren't really all that big... but they do need to be on top of a huge stack that gets to LEO in the first place. Getting to the Moon from GEO is very trivial in comparison to what it took to get there in the first place.

You are correct, that the actual gravitational pull while standing on a huge tower or "sky scraper" that would be built to LEO altitudes would be almost identicle to standing at sea level on the Earth. The difference is that you are already moving at orbital velocities.

One or two successful missions != Safe Shuttle

[antispam_ben]

I've been reading James Gleick's bio of Richard Feynman, "Genius" and I've just been through the part where Feynman is on the 1993 Challenger investigation team, and he does the famous rubber-O-ring-in-the-ice-water trick for Congress. Feynman interviewed many engineers in different areas of the Shuttle program and was appalled as he found out that NASA was "approaching the envelope" on so many things. They had set high technical standards at the beginning, and then loosened them as they had more flights, and assumed that since they had had an uneventful flight that the more lax standards were okay. As the Challenger loss (and more recent Columbia loss) shows, this is a bad, HORRIBLE way to run things.

I do hope that not only future Shuttle missions, but also future NASA manned programs are run much differently and to much more rigorous standards.