Here is the Hubbles mirror designer:
Posted on 06/24/2006 9:44:14 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
The primary instrument aboard the Hubble Space Telescope shut down this week, an unwelcome reminder that the observatory's future is tightly tied to NASA's upcoming space shuttle launch... Project managers expect the telescope's Advanced Camera for Surveys to be out of commission at least through the end of the month, but have high hopes it eventually will be recovered... If engineers' initial troubleshooting efforts are correct, the problem should be resolved by switching to a backup electronics unit. A circuit on the primary unit is believed to have failed. The backup unit was extensively tested before Hubble was put into orbit in 1990 but has not been powered on since... The efforts to extend Hubble's life were sparked by the prospect of reinstating a previously canceled fifth servicing mission to Hubble by space shuttle astronauts. Former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe canceled the mission, which had been planned for late 2004 or early 2005, after the 2003 Columbia accident and the findings of the board the investigated the disaster. The backlash to O'Keefe's decision was swift and harsh. O'Keefe's successor, Michael Griffin, pledged to reinstate the flight if post-Columbia safety upgrades proved successful. NASA is most concerned with having a shuttle fuel tank that does not shed debris during launch.
(Excerpt) Read more at dsc.discovery.com ...
Just putting my plugged nickel worth of a suggestion about what to do about it into the common pot, nothing more than that. Since you started the thread, you [#1 on the thread] are the most logical keeper of that common pot.
GSlob: For balance problems - I was under the impression that shuttle engines are vectorable. Attachment support would have to be engineered in.The STS main engines (as well as the SRBs) are indeed dual gimbal.
Each engine can be gimbaled plus or minus 10.5 degrees in the yaw axis and plus or minus 10.5 degrees in the pitch axis for thrust vector control by hydraulically powered gimbal actuator.However, the bulk of the thrust comes from the SRBs. The original vision for the shuttle was a vehicle which could both take off and land like a plane (I think that's what dhuffman@awod.com referred to above. That proved to be too much to engineer (and the engineering was superb back then as well), so we wound up with a rocket launch and glider reentry / deadstick landing.
GWB has set the process in motion, without a lot of people noticing, of moving "normal" space launches over to commercial ventures (most likely Burt Rutan's t/Space). Whether it is the liberty ship BDB or the next generation "elegant" solution provided by Rutan, I don't care, so long as we get our ass off of this rock and out there!!!!!
And the CEV will take us back to the moon and some derivative of it will take us to Mars (if we can beat the Chinese there). However, regardless of what language is spoken when we get there, we (humanity) will get to the stars. I don't care what color the person's skin is that first touches down on the soil of a planet circling another star, but I do pray that they remember who we American's were and what we truly stood for and what we truly have done for intelligent life in this universe, as we know it.
Me, I'm counting on Niven and Pournelle's Fallen Angels, Ing's Heavy Lifters and Bova's Privateers. The power of "enlightened self interest," once unleashed, can accomplish just about anything (which can make a profit). We will go back. We will make "those reaches" our home or we will die in the attempt, but if we die, the future of humanity will die with us... or so says Stephen Hawking. I don't think I'll argue with his reasoning.
To quote (I think) Dean Ing:
The meek will inherit the Earth, but the bold will inherit the stars.
I was told by someone at JSP that the design for the Hubble was based on the design of spy satellites...and when they ground the mirrors, they forgot to adjust for the fact it was looking outward, not down to earth.
Don't know if that's totally true.
But I was a member of the Johnson Space Center Astronomy Society (my dad still is fairly active with them via computer), and knew some people who were involved with the mission when they corrected the Hubble's vision.
Hope they can get it fixed.
I feel old today. :') I was alive for Mercury, but remember Gemini. The Apollo I fire made a deep impression on me (Grand Rapids produced Roger B. Chaffee) and -- as the saying goes -- I remember the Life magazine cover captioned "The Incredible Year". And that was retrospective of 1968. 1969 outdid that. "I'm stepping off the LEM now..."
As one of the Four Yorkshiremen say at the end of that Monty Python sketch, "if you try to tell the young people of today that, they won't believe you." ;')
My favorite TV shows in elementary school included "My Favorite Martians", "FireBall XL5" (10 AM Saturdays), and when I could get 'em, "Star Trek" and "Lost In Space".
May have been, but I think the initial trouble with Hubble's first first light pertained to either a bit of pork barrel politics, or to going with the low bidder despite the lack of experience and expertise. :')
Low bid I suspect, although the company that made the mirrors was making them for the DOD, too....don't know how smart they were running their business. And the problem was in how the mirrors were ground. They made a mistake in the calculations.
I've gotten drunk with himI've never met Jerry Pournelle, but I'm guessing that's not an exclusive club. ;')
And the CEV will take us back to the moon and some derivative of it will take us to Mars (if we can beat the Chinese there). However, regardless of what language is spoken when we get there, we (humanity) will get to the stars. I don't care what color the person's skin is that first touches down on the soil of a planet circling another star, but I do pray that they remember who we American's were and what we truly stood for and what we truly have done for intelligent life in this universe, as we know it.The way they'll remember it is if we're the ones to do it. :')
That's my impression as well. I actually "knew" him from meeting him several times at computer events in the late 70s and early 80s. He was one of the original "wise men" columnists in the nascent PC industry (and he was right far more than he was wrong and he was usually wrong only on timing). Years later I spent a long drunken weekend with him and Larry Niven at a Science Fiction convention (my first... and I discovered what a "con suite" was). I then saw him at least twice a year at computer events and he always recognized me and said hello. Half the time, however, he would whisper to me something to the effect "my wife is here with me, don't mention what we did." We didn't do ANYTHING, but I gather he had no way of remember that, therefore I played along... for all it was worth!!!!
I have every faith that "we" will get there first, regardless of the language we speak. I'm counting on the free humans to make it there first. So far that means Americans or those who have aligned with us ideologically. The three books I mentioned in my earlier post, Fallen Angels, Heavy Lifters and Privateers, I consider my "space entrepreneur's" trilogy, even though they have totally separate authors. All speak to the spirit of free enterprise (with a bit of larceny and rebellion) triumphing over the bureaucrats and Luddites. I reread them every couple of years for inspiration.
The best solution is to jut put it on top of the tank. Then the foam can peal off all it wants to.
I mentioned possible modifications of the existing design - different, but not too much different.
I used to read his computer column (in "Byte" magazine, perhaps?), which is how I came to dislike him. :') But seriously, I think Niven is a lot more fun to read, if I have to read fiction, which I don't. The last fiction I read fresh (iow, something I hadn't read before) besides some short stories by P.K.Dick was "Ringworld Engineers" (in 1984 or '85).
I think that's the source of an anecdote -- anyway, Niven wrote that at some engineering geek convention a bunch of engineers started marching through the hotel chanting, "the Ringworld is unstable!" and gave that as one of the motivations for that first sequel. Now there are a couple more I think, including man-kzin wars.
The only JP fiction I read was that one about the asteroid crash, the name escapes me with considerable velocity. Read that circa 1980 I suppose. That one may have been a collaborative effort between Larry and Jerry anyway. Some pretty stiff conservative vignettes in there, and of course, China gets nuked. :'D
The shuttle derived vehicle proposals of 20 or so years ago (and occasionally revisited for some years thereafter) would have made some sense. That could really have saved money by economy of (a little more) scale, shared components, spare parts, etc. As it was, the reusability was mostly a mirage, and cost per pound to orbit reductions were entirely a mirage. So maybe the SDVs would have worsened the problem, and wound up building in even more inertia.
The main reason for the new booster not being SRB-based (and therefore shuttle-derived) is that they A) puke out some pollutants and I think the new booster is all-cryo (water being the exhaust); and B) that the SRBs are expensive to recycle. The new booster will be cheaper and expendible, and pretty hot to trot. :')
It's amusing that expendible boosters turn out to be cheaper, considering the mantra of recycling that has prevailed for over twenty-five years...
LOL!
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