Posted on 01/29/2016 8:03:15 AM PST by rktman
In the aftermath of Challenger, there was never any doubt about continuing, never the thought of quitting. After the Columbia accident almost seventeen years later, however, the program was wound down over the next eight years. Once construction of the International Space Station was completed, the Shuttles were grounded and the shuttle program ended.
I think that was a mistake. Space Shuttle was and remains the most capable flying machine ever conceived, built and operated. We learned much from the thirty years of Shuttle flights, and in my opinion, we should still be flying them. Shuttle carried a crew of seven, plus nearly sixty thousand pounds of payload to low earth orbit. After transforming from a rocket into an orbital research or construction platform, it entered the atmosphere and landed on a conventional runway at the end of its mission. After around one hundred days of processing, it was ready to fly again.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.scientificamerican.com ...
A piece of 1970’s technology that has already suffered a couple of critical failures. What could go wrong?
They should have been kept flying at least until there was a replacement.
Ridiculous.
NeedleSLY huge, heavy and wasteful.
Cool as all hell, yes, It’s almost like a 747.
DRONES
Shutting it down wasn't wrong.
Building it in the first place was wrong.
Having built it, shutting it down without a replacement was wrong.
Obama has made us weaker as a nation in every way he could.
Bingo. My thoughts exactly.
They all would have crashed before then.
Seriously ... it’s not funny at all what happened with the shuttles.
Would it have kept going until the 2020's or 2030's?
I saw a tv special once, that outlined some of the weaknesses of the shuttle:
- Cost savings with the re-useable craft were dimished, because of the practically complete tear down and rebuild required.
- Turn around times never met original expectations
- Positioning the crew astride the rocket, and not on top, made it impossible to include a launch pad ejection system
- Using the entire vehicle as a re-entry device caused a huge need for heat shielding...since the very beginning, the heat tiles were a problem, always some were lost...which really was walking on a razor’s edge
- Positioning the craft astride and almost under the fuel tank made it very vulnerable to debris falling off the fuel tank.
The conclusion of the special was that we already have a ‘platform’ for doing experiments in space - the ISS. And, and new rocket should resemble the traditional rocket, with crew pod on top. It could still deliver a large payload - satellites are launched into space with traditional rockets, all the time.
The space shuttle as built by Rockwell was an aged design that performed reasonably well over it’s service life. Yes, there were design flaws that were later corrected. When it was retired, it was time for the Space Shuttle system to go. The main problem was that there wasn’t a truly viable alternative in place to succeed it. There were ideas, but nothing really solid.
Then the mediots elected Onambla and NASA was tunred into a muslim outreach agency and it’s funding slashed to pay for EBT cards for the Free $h!t Army.
Should we have built a follow-on system absolutely. But in true Onambla style, everything has gone to pot.
Obama couldn’t wait to give the shuttles to his friends
Congress/NASA killed it by not funding the Ares/SLS adequately. Michoud can only hold STS or SLS assemblies, but not both. So to build the new(er) rockets, NASA had to kill the STS to have room at Michoud. Hard to believe that they could spend so much money on paper and starting/stopping SLS efforts and they couldn’t find enough money to build another huge empty building. That was a shovel ready program.
Reminds me of when they killed the SR71 for the Keyholes.
http://www.space.com/31511-spacex-rocket-landing-great-shape-photos.html
A little birdie recently told me that NASA is out there trying to hire FORTRAN programmers.
So perhaps some un-mothballing is in the works.
The problem is by the time you get these things designed, field tested, budgeted, approved, and actually built, they are already long obsolete. Hence the FORTRAN.
Bring back Dyna-Soar!!!
The Orion system is safer and more efficient. What we should never have shut down, and should have improved, is the Saturn V heavy lift system. We would have maintained a competitive edge over the Russian system.
Who would have thought in 1969 that we would be stuck in LEO for the next 50 years? (Look kids - an astronaut eating a water bubble! Ever seen that before?)
Oh and it killed 14 people.
I think the Shuttle did a good job but needed to be retired. The Orion program should not have been killed.
The Shuttle was poorly designed for safety and civilian missions. It was also expensive for what we used it for. The Shuttle was supposed to be retired in the early 90’s. The ISS delays kept it going.
In the next 3 years we’re going to have more crewed capsules and rockets than we’ll know what to do with. They’ll all be safer, far more economical and better suited for their missions than the Shuttle.
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