Shuttle Fleet Grounded

dragon300zx

The shuttle fleet has been grounded again. The Discovery will be grounded once it returns. The chunk of foam the broke off yesterday was rather large and until they can figure out why the large chunks of foam are falling off the tank the shuttles will not fly. :cry

Shay Stephens

Scrap the Shuttles, start new with something that resembles 21st century technology!!!

How many signs do they to get this through their heads?

Oh and while were at it, how about ditching the glorified janitors floating up there in the pork station known as ISS. How much money is dumped into that money pit I can't fathom. Get back to basics, modernize, and do some cool stuff that means something...

I want modern rapid scalable access to space, a practical space station, and I want a moon base.

With that, the solar system is our playground.

dragon300zx

The space station is planned to be a port for the moon base so it is important that it gets finished. Last I read NASA is saying we are about 10 years off at least from having the new craft for manned space flight. There are alot of things these shuttles can still do i fthey can figure out the foam. Either way there are still plenty of things that the shuttle can be used for even with developing the technology for future manned space flight. They may be old, there may be some old technology in them, but they are a hell of alot more advanced than most airplanes we fly in, cars we drive, etc. They need to fix this problem quickly and get back up in space. An absence from manned space flight for 2.5 years was too long we can't just sit out of it for up to 10 years waiting for the next generation of space craft.

Andy

dragon300zx wrote:

The shuttle fleet has been grounded again. The Discovery will be grounded once it returns. The chunk of foam the broke off yesterday was rather large and until they can figure out why the large chunks of foam are falling off the tank the shuttles will not fly. :cry

a) we don't care about your opionion until you remove that damn earring!

b) i agree w/ shay, i want to take off in a tie-fighter to space

DJ-S1

I think you are both right. And boy, what to do with the Shuttles, the ISS and even the Hubble can lead to more fights than religion or politics!

The shuttles were built with 70's technology, before the computer revolution. The original computing power onboard was very low. Now they have continued to upgrade the systems but the still have to work within the confines of using space rated equipment. They can't just call up Dell and put a few P4's up there. I don't know for certain but I think that they are still using very old processors because they are the best they have that are space-rated.

But none of that means they should be scapped. They can be made safe to fly, and they are needed. Truth be told, they are needed past the 2010 date that Bush threw out there. And the ISS is needed too.

If for nothing else they are needed just to keep the engineering teams and launch teams somewhat intact. It sounds stupid, but losing the experienced personnel that a prolonged lack of launches would cause would be crippling. Don't forget why the US built the Seawolf submarine. It was not needed, the USSR was no longer a threat. The only reason to build a few was to keep the submarine builders afloat and keep from bleeding experienced personnel. They became a test-bed for new technologies.

I think that if we want to be in space, we need to go there, and stay there, and keep working the difficult problems to find solutions. Yes, it's risky. Yes, it's worth it. But if you keep the experience in place, then the lessons learned from these flights will be applied to the new ship designs and make them better, too. And the moon becomes a reality sooner.

Feel free to tell me I'm full of it, I love discussing this stuff. :

ginger_55

I want the money. So much I could do with it, starting with some basics.

YOu all want the space station, I want to continue to live where I do with some repairs, etc...........

I want the kids schools to be good, they are older than the space shuttle. The teachers are buying the supplies.

But most of all, I, myself, Ginger, I could use some of that money.

Oops, nice people don't talk about money. I whine about it all the time.

But it really annoys me to see gazillions of dollars going into space, etc. The decisions and the rationale are always explained to me by people who don't worry about any of the things I do.

If poor educated people started really pushing for and wanting space stations and other very expensive govt paid for things, if they could explain the need to me in a way I could accept, that would be one thing, but for people without worries re the basics of survival, for them to argue the merits of space travel, it annoys me.

And I don't mean you all, as you are not in power to do anything about it, that I know of, when it annoys me is when people are in power to do what they want ..................etc, rant on..........

Rant,
ginger

dragon300zx

andy wrote:

a) we don't care about your opionion until you remove that damn earring!

b) i agree w/ shay, i want to take off in a tie-fighter to space

Lets see ya remove yours first...

I agree w/shay that we need a new vehicle for manned space flight as well. But until then we should try to make what we have usable.

Andy

dragon300zx wrote:

Lets see ya remove yours first...

:nono i'm actually looking for a bigger one, my wife's presently wearing it which means i have to get her larger ones

lpswimmer003

I was hoping to see the shuttle take off yesterday. I can usually see it from my back yard, but there were too many fluffy white clouds on the horizon, so I couldn't see it. Night lift-offs are the best!! Unfortunately, I'm a bit to far away to be able to take pictures of the lift-offs.

David_S85

Shay's never going to achieve his dream of being the first photographer to shoot a wedding on the moon (or Mars) unless they get these aging space buses fixed of force themselves to come up with a new design.

The Shuttle system has never lived up to it's promise. Recap... A mission every few weeks, with a turn-around time of one week per orbiter. $10 million per flight. One half dozen working orbiters. Completed space station by 1995. True international cooperation and funding. They've come the closest with the last one.

A permanent grounding (or worse) is the only thing that's going to force NASA to get their butt in gear to design and build the next orbiter series. This is probably 20 years off, at best. By then, other consortiums, countries, or private enterprise will be ahead of anything NASA will [over]design.

Sad to say, but NASA's humans in space program is about at an end. I'll give it a year or three more. And United States moon bases? Right. Will get cancelled by the next president or congress, for sure.

Shay Stephens

Watch out, I'm going to blow!!!
I am willing to speculate that my ticket to space and the moon will be on a Virgin Galactic ship making a stop off at an orbital hotel with daily service to the moon base.

Like film, NASA is dead if they don't get their act in order. They need to start fresh. And by fresh, I mean deorbit the ISS, scrap out the shuttle program, take all the money that would have been sunk into these programs and start a fast track program to get back into space, a place we abandoned 30 years ago.

A tight focus on cost control and getting real people into space doing things people love to do. Not this international governmental love fest "look at us cooperate" junk. Get paying passengers, I would love to send up my own hobby satellite, I would love to visit space. But so long as NASA is in control, only a select few individuals will ever make it into space and we will see the Hubble burn up with no replacement.

There are some good initiatives they are starting to pick up on, like the space elevator. But they are so mired in legacy projects that have a lot of politics behind it that I don't know if they can overcome their own momentum. Thats why I advocate the drastic measure of scrapping and deorbiting. It would force the immediate change in priorities and free up needed money.

Keep the engineers and fire most of the administrative staff too probably is in order to change the culture. Free up the engineers to get spunky.

But I really doubt this is going to happen, and that is why I am placing my confidence in private enterprise to make it happen.

And don't get me started on the insanity of pushing for a manned mars mission when we don't even have a stable moon base to work from. Ya, 100% guarantee that those astronauts will be popsicles hurtling past the outer planets...show me you can go to the moon and stay there for a while before you go biting off more than you can chew.

Sheesh!!!

David_S85 wrote:

Shay's never going to achieve his dream of being the first photographer to shoot a wedding on the moon (or Mars) unless they get these aging space buses fixed of force themselves to come up with a new design.

The Shuttle system has never lived up to it's promise. Recap... A mission every few weeks, with a turn-around time of one week per orbiter. $10 million per flight. One half dozen working orbiters. Completed space station by 1995. True international cooperation and funding. They've come the closest with the last one.

A permanent grounding (or worse) is the only thing that's going to force NASA to get their butt in gear to design and build the next orbiter series. This is probably 20 years off, at best. By then, other consortiums, countries, or private enterprise will be ahead of anything NASA will [over]design.

Sad to say, but NASA's humans in space program is about at an end. I'll give it a year or three more. And United States moon bases? Right. Will get cancelled by the next president or congress, for sure.

ian408

Burt Rutan.

Ian

wholenewlight

Shay Stephens wrote:

There are some good initiatives they are starting to pick up on, like the space elevator. . .

I've been watching the Virgin Galactic effort for a few years but i had not heard of a space elevator before. I did a google search and found a bunch of stuff. Pretty interesting concept. For everyone who is in the dark like me, here's a quick link:

http://www.elevator2010.org/site/primer.html

And a much more detailed link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator

gus

The whole fleet grounded Like they had 6 ready to go next week.

pathfinder

ian408 wrote:

Burt Rutan.

Ian

SpaceShipOne --

DJ-S1

I'm a big Burt Rutan fan too, but there's a huge difference between "sub-orbital" and "orbital". Making human-rated spacecraft is very, very difficult. Don't underestimate it. I hope private enterprise can get there, but I'm not holding my breath.

The problem I see with NASA is that the direction changes every year at budget review time. Congress can and does change NASA's funding levels constantly. And so every year NASA picks and chooses which programs to kill so that others can survive. That's not the way to run a high-tech, high-risk enterprise. All those programs that get started and then get cut a year or two later; that's an incredible waste of resources.

The original shuttle designs were so bastardized in the 70's in order to meet Congress' cost demands it's rediculous. All those quotes of 20 launches a year, etc, were practically outright lies told just to keep the funding going. Everyone knew that.

What we need is for the government to say "go build a reliable human-rated spacecraft and moon base system, and a reliable, unmanned heavy-lift launch system. You will receive $2 billion every year for the work and the funding will not be cut by this or future administrations."

To paraphrase the movie Parenthood - "Let's come back from La-La Land cuz that ain't gonna happen."

ian408

For me, the question isn't orbital vs. sub-orbital but more that here's a guy
who, with a small team, built and flew a craft with private funding.

He has shown that private industry can succeed at the challange.

Ian

mercphoto

What amazes me most is that the public never moans about auto racing whenever a racer dies and that it should be stopped until we can find a way to stop racing fatalities. People, this is space travel. It is difficult. It is dangerous. You can lose your life doing it. If we don't expect a 100% survival rate in auto racing, why in the heck do we expect 100% survival rate in space travel? The shuttle now has a 99% success rate on take-off and a 99% success rate on landings. Pretty good when looked at that way.

As per the old technology, much of the new electronics technology is not space-rated. In particulart it is not radiation hardened. And the smaller the geometries on the chips the harder it is to make withstand the cosmic rays of space. Besides that, it is usually best to put an older but established technology to work in life-critical situations than to put brand new tecnology that might still have some flaws in it.

Fundamentally I agree that the Space Shuttle never reached the goal it was supposed to in terms of how often it would fly and how cheaply it would fly. And one reason why the ISS is in such a low and useless orbit is because that is the highest the shuttle can fly to service it. It needs to be replaced.

I want back to the moon. I want to go to Mars.

dragon300zx

Griffith says the foam problem will be fixed so they can keep launching the shuttles. While I agree they are outdated NASA is already working on the new space vehicle but it will take time. I'm not saying the shuttles are the best solution. But no one has built anything better than the shuttles yet. No other country has a reusable space vehicle that can carry the kind's of payloads the shuttle can. It may not have came out as what it was billed at when it was thought up but ya still have to give it props for what it has and will still accomplish in the future.

DJ-S1

ian408 wrote:

For me, the question isn't orbital vs. sub-orbital but more that here's a guy
who, with a small team, built and flew a craft with private funding.

True, and I'm not downplaying Rutan's accomplishment at all, but orbital vs. sub-orbital really is a big deal. An exerpt (from here):

The costs of development, construction, and operation of Tier One, although not publicly released, are estimated to be in the range of 20 million to 30 million US dollars, roughly two to three times the value of the Ansari X Prize award. The sole sponsor, initially secret, was revealed to be Paul Allen, a co-founder of Microsoft and the fifth richest person in the world. The revelation, on December 17 2003, the same day as the program's first powered flight test, followed speculation that Allen was involved.

Some commentators have drawn comparisons between the relative inexpense of the Tier One program and the high cost of the Space Shuttle program, though the technological difficulties of the two programs are completely different. SpaceShipOne, because it flies suborbitally, does not need to reach the high speeds of the Space Shuttle (Mach 3 vs. Mach 25), nor the same altitude (100 km suborbital vs. 400 km orbit). SpaceShipOne also does not carry the same crew (3 men vs. 7) or payload (negligible vs. 25 tons), and makes much shorter flights (a few minutes vs. several days). The SpaceShipOne program is a technical achievement more on a par with the X-15 than the Shuttle.

You have to put at least 25 times the energy into the craft to go orbital, and then you have to dissipate that energy onthe way back as well. I hope he can do it, but it's going to take a lot of time and effort. Look at the huge programs, time and cost that Airbus and Boeing took to complete their new airliners. And that wasn't re-inventing anything or going into space.

ian408

I don't think anyone believes orbital flight is easy. Lord knows there are many examples
of failed private companies that thought they knew how to do it.

Mars Rover was the NASA equiv in some sense of the spirit of innovation and
entrepenurship (sp?)...at least at the government level. Small team, limited budget
and limited scope for the science.

Ian

DJ-S1

Ian, I didn't mean to imply you were saying orbital flight was easy. I have a general thought in my head that most people think that what SpaceShipOne did and what the shuttles do aren't all that different.

ian408

DJ-S1 wrote:

Ian, I didn't mean to imply you were saying orbital flight was easy. I have a general thought in my head that most people think that what SpaceShipOne did and what the shuttles do aren't all that different.

No worries.

I agree that most people are of the opinion that SpaceShip One isn't all that
far off the shuttle mark. And maybe, in some small way, it isn't. It's just a
building block for things to come

David_S85

dragon300zx wrote:

But no one has built anything better than the shuttles yet. No other country has a reusable space vehicle that can carry the kind's of payloads the shuttle can.

True, the US Shuttle is the best of what it is, but by no means the only reusable system. The Russian shuttle, the Buran, flew in 1988, and unmanned at that, before the country couldn't afford their space program at the size it once was. And it was huge...
http://www.aerospaceguide.net/buran/

Japan has been developing and test flying their own (smaller) shuttle type system for a few years now...
http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/nasda_shuttle_021018.html

At the success rate of Burt Rutan's efforts, and now with the Virgin Atlantic additional funding, there seems to be nothing Rutan's group can't accomplish. They're only just beginning. Burt, in interviews, has hinted at a larger goal than just sub-orbital tourist trips, but he keeps those secrets to a small circle of friends.

Shay Stephens

I know they are planning orbital, and there are a number of companies that will be putting up inflatable space stations (at least initially) once there is a way to get to them.

The next 20 years is going to see a huge jump in progress largely through private enterprise. The blinders have been removed, and we now know we don't have to rely on a government to get to space.

Regular joes *will* have access to space.

David_S85 wrote:

At the success rate of Burt Rutan's efforts, and now with the Virgin Galactic additional funding, there seems to be nothing Rutan's group can't accomplish. They're only just beginning. Burt, in interviews, has hinted at a larger goal than just sub-orbital tourist trips, but he keeps those secrets to a small circle of friends.