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 ...
I have never heard this before. So it goes up, snags a satellite, and re-enters over thee Pacific, and glides to CA?
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In a polar orbit which is where the spy satellites are. Because of the Earth’s rotation the Shuttle would have been further out in the Pacific when it returned.
Good points!
“They should have been kept flying at least until there was a replacement.”
Except that they kept starting replacement programs and then shutting them down. Over and over. Only when it was retired did they get serous about funding replacements. And now we have 3-4 replacements that are almost down. The dragon, the CTS-100 and the Dreamchaser are all due to fly pretty soon. Orion is not far behind them. It took shutting the shuttle down to finally get NASA to start getting serious about funding the replacements.
Before Columbia there were times when a rescue shuttle could have been repurposed and prepped within a few weeks. After Columbia doing so was built into the planning, using the ISS as a lifeboat.
For the last Hubble Repair mission, where the shuttle (Atlantis) couldn’t make it to the ISS, a rescue shuttle (Endeavour) was actually prepped and ready to go, with the mission being assigned the designation STS-400.
It was also unnecessarily large because of the side of payload the Airforce wanted to land with. Ironically the growth in size (weight) meant the launch pad they were building for it at Vandenberg turned out to be too small and they scrapped the whole idea. The darn thing was suppose to make space launches 10 times cheaper and instead it made them twice as expensive.
One bad design problem was that there were features that precluded remote flight- you had to have people on board to take off and land, by design. I’ve been told that it was done this way so that hero astronauts would never be obsolete.
If you could have flown it remotely, then resupply missions to the Space Station would have been safer and would carry more cargo.
The Soviet Buran could fly remotely and carried far more payload because it did not have massive rockets and fuel.
Best post I’ve read today.
Space flight is never 100% safe, but man-rated flight vehicles must stand up to a level of reliability that unmanned vehicles are not required to meet.
Statistically, the space shuttle reliability is very poor for a man-rated system. Out of 135 flights, 2 catastrophic failures. That's a reliability of 98.5%, which is ok for launching hardware (insurance will cover that), but for man-rated...would you like to fly a vehicle that you know 1 out of every 60-70 flight would kill you and your crew?
The shuttle was sexy, and it was a major incentive in my own career motivations and decisions. But in hindsight it tried to do too much (by Buck Rogers Air Force requirements). It had to be man rated with life support for a large crew for up to two weeks, it had to be a heavy lift vehicle, and it had to be reusable. We have been reminded by the accidents that the hardware can be delivered in heavy lift vehicles separately with no risk to crew, while a more manageable crew vehicle can handle the task of getting the crew to and from heavy hardware or station without the added risk of being strapped to the side of a hydrogen bomb with no reliable abort system.
A multi-part solid-fuel rocket sealed with temperature- sensitive gaskets, and then launched outside its certified temperature range. What could go wrong?
I know I think I ranted about that in a thread yesterday about the challenger disaster.
That means I’m not the only one around here who remembers the 1970s ...
Yup. Too much internal conflict on “who” was the best to move forward. So, here we are 4 and a half years later paying Putin big buck to send us to ISS. Then we’ll pay him big bucks to buy engines.
What we need, and what we’ve needed for a while now, is a man-rated SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) vehicle...a true ‘space plane’.
I thought we had it with VentureStar...but it was cancelled.
And the SST! The Concorde should never have been put to pasture. And where are the Edsels of yesteryear? Never mind we’ve taken close-ups of Pluto and are all over Mars like fleas. There’s something lost by not being able to go into orbit and come back down. Mostly the expense.
I just rewatched 2010, the Space Odyssey sequel, and was amused to see the clunky personal computers in use, TVs that never went flat screen, 8-bit spaceship animation displays, and the wondrous HAL/SAL computers the size of deep freezers and computational power of an iPhone.
The future isn’t what it used to be.
Both accidents were caused by known problems which could have been avoided except for political pressure.
They knew about the O-ring leakage in cold weather. Action? - "Launch anyway, we have a ton of great PR in place with the first school teacher as a crew member!"
Insulating foam chunks falling off the External Tank? - Thanks to switching to "Environmentally Sensitive Foam Insulation".
Keep politics as far from engineering as possible!
Good points. I’d forgotten about the payload size.
That reminds me. The fatal Columbia reentry was the heaviest ever. It think Spacelab was in the cargo bay.
Keep politics as far from engineering as possible!
You'll get no argument from me there. I'd take that principle all the way back to the beginning of the design phase ...
We could use it to lob nukes at our enemies too.
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