Posted on 02/19/2004 4:21:11 PM PST by yonif
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) - NASA said Thursday that the shuttle will remain grounded until early next year, and once launches do resume, a second spaceship will be on standby to rescue the astronauts if their craft is damaged in flight. Because of the Columbia disaster one year ago, NASA decided last month that all shuttles from now on will be devoted to completing the international space station. That way, the astronauts can inspect and repair their ships at the orbiting outpost and await rescue there if the damage is too grave.
The rescue shuttle will not necessarily be on the launch pad, but will be ready to fly to the space station within 45 to 90 days, shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said. That is how long seven additional astronauts could remain aboard the space station before food, oxygen and other supplies ran out.
NASA had been aiming for its first post-Columbia launch as early as next fall, but Administrator Sean O'Keefe said it would now be no earlier than January 2005. Because of a new safety requirement for daylight launches in order to photograph the liftoff from multiple angles, the space agency is limited in the number of days it can send a shuttle to the station.
O'Keefe said five or six potential launch dates are available in January. "If that looks like it's forcing anybody to do anything in a way that pressures that schedule at all, we'll defer it to March if need be," he said during a visit to Orlando, Fla.
The space agency has yet to decide which shuttle - Atlantis or Discovery - will make the first post-Columbia flight and which one will be the standby. Shuttle flights, along with space station construction, have been on hold since Columbia shattered over Texas on Feb. 1, 2003.
This will be the first time the space agency has had a rescue ship waiting in the wings since the days of NASA's first space station, Skylab, in the 1970s.
NASA deputy associate administrator Michael Kostelnik said it is too soon to say whether a shuttle will be on standby for succeeding missions as well.
"I don't believe that there's an awful lot of extra training or extra things that we have to do for a rescue mission," Parsons said. "It would just be going to the international space station, docking, picking up crew, making sure that we had the appropriate hardware and different things that we needed to bring that crew on board and then return safely."
In the case of Columbia, such a rescue would have been impossible. The shuttle did not visit the space station; it was in an entirely different orbit than the station and lacked the fuel to get there.
Any shuttle sent to Columbia's aid would have had to fly in formation, and spacewalks would have been needed to transfer Columbia's seven astronauts over to the rescue ship.
The shuttle that lifts off on the first flight since Columbia will incorporate numerous changes, including improvements to the external fuel tank and the leading edges of the wings. The changes were prompted by the Columbia accident, in which a piece of foam broke off from the external tank during launch and damaged the wing, dooming the spacecraft during re-entry.
"We're certainly interested in reducing the risk," Kostelnik said. Having a shuttle on standby will provide "added robustness," he added.
As many as 35 more shuttle missions are needed to finish building the space station.
NASA recently canceled one last servicing mission to the Hubble Space Telescope and consigned it to an early death because a shuttle could not fly from Hubble to the space station in an emergency. The space agency decided it was not worth risking astronauts' lives to service the telescope.
The space agency is still struggling to come up with shuttle wing repair kits and inspection booms for astronauts in orbit. And engineers are still trying to figure out how to keep the fuel-tank foam insulation from breaking off.
"We said, 'Stop. Let's go ahead and extend the (launch) schedule and let's figure out what the right way is to go about" meeting the recommendations of the Columbia accident investigators, O'Keefe said. "We're not going to be driven by the calendar. This is going to be a milestone-driven event."
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Associated Press writer Mike Schneider in Orlando, Fla., contributed to this report.
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On the Net:
NASA: http://spaceflight.nasa.gov
2. The problem that lead to the breakup was more a failure of management. The problem could have been managed, no attempt was made to manage it.
3. I don't know what technical changes are planned, if any to improve safety. So far the emphasis is on management, as it should be, but those changes should have been quick to identify and quick to implement.
4. The shuttle is a dead system. The compromises made to get Nixon's OMB to fund it removed the very reason to build it in the first place. The real flaws are architectural. No amount of tweaking will make it a fundamentally safe, reliable, or cheap vehicle, so why bother? Risk is not eliminated, just managed. The shuttle risks are well known, and both accidents were the result of boneheaded management.
5. The space station is married to the shuttle and in the wrong orbit. It can't really be lifted with anything else, and its orbit makes it useless for many of the things you would build a station for.
6. All the national second-guessing that follows these accidents is an indication of the problem. How many test pilots have died? You name a street at Edwards after them and move on. But space is treated differently. Every launch is a national event, and rightly so for the portion of the budget it consumes. This is silly. Launches should be so routine than no one notices, and an accident is much less grievous than the loss of an airliner that the world barely hiccups over.
7. We will never go anywhere in space, indeed space will never really be worth doing until we let go of the current paradigm and open it up to the people. Come up with reasonable launch regulations, refute stupid treaties and provide meaningful subsidy for the development of space. End wasteful, national prestige antics and treating every astronaut and vehicle like an irreplaceable national treasure.
That sounds good. But my question is wouldn't you think there will have to be some sort of government regulation or monitoring of what private companies will be doing in space? For safety reasons of course.
The new Republican NASA, Hubble need 1 service mission and does more and better science then the ISS, so NASA decides to dedicate shuttle missions to ISS. Great thinking NASA, way to go. Let your best science instrument burn up while letting the BS ISS burn up our tax dollars.
Space is a dangerous place if NASA doesn't have enough spine to send men into space when men need to go into space then NASA needs to go away and let some other group that still has the "right stuff" take over.
Some things do need to be profit-motivated. Launch services should be profit motivated, and it looks like NASA will be getting out of the launch business. Shuttle was an effort to nationalize the launch business and it works about as well as socialism in general.
NASA should buy launch services. Plenty of companies can provide it.
Yeah -- I saw the groves killed off in the citrus belt, too (I lived among'em!). You're right - it takes about 4+ hours at 28 to damage them. But for starters, it's typically 3-5 degrees warmer at the coast. And USUALLY, low temps are short-lived. But there was indeed a period of 4-5 years that just blasted the groves in the late 80's. It has hardly been that cold since.
The ice you refer to is due to the cryo gasses, which happened in the middle of July, too.
Here's the rub: NASA was stupid to have launched Challenger: this was an abberation that can't be repeated due to new post-Challenger flight rules. Again, I don't think January '05 is their problem. It's a general culture that has repeatedly believed "we engineered this stuff to the max - it couldn't possibly be a problem." They're good -- real good -- but hardly perfect.
I believe that is correct and under certain conditions would be a viable solution. However, it still wouldn't have helped the crew of Columbia a year ago because we were told by NASA after the disaster that Columbia could not have reached the ISS because it lacked the fuel to match orbit with the ISS and it also lacked a suitable docking ring for docking with the ISS.
So, NASA...will all future STS missions be sent to the same height as ISS and, if not, will they carry sufficient fuel and docking adapters to attain synchronous orbit with the ISS?
Bryan Oller / The (Colorado Springs, Colo.) Gazette / AP photo
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