ralph124c, interestingly, one of the “concept” drawings for the most recent NASA post-shuttle thought-exercise (hardly deign calling it a “program”), the “Orbital Space Plane”, looks surprisingly like what the Hermes would have looked like. Alas, Hermes died of the pernicious two-way punch of unreasonable initial expectations meeting stupendous costs to develop even a stripped-down version (it didn’t help that the Ariane-5 took longer to develop than expected, and who knows if will ever be reliable enough for man-rating).
Since for the time being spacecraft are still experimental machines in high-risk environments, the task should be: " put 4 people and a modest payload up in orbit, enable them to do useful work in humane conditions, bring them down alive, provide a reasonable chance of living thru a survivable accident, make it reusable." What you want is a Soyuz that is reusable and has 5 times the useful space/payload. Never mind 25-ton payloads, creature comforts, etc. You want an experimental lab platform? Send up a Zarya-class module on an expendable rocket and dock once you’re up there. You want something with manipulator arms that can fly around in orbit and go git some satellites for recovery purposes? robotic arms and
…such, you build it into a Russian TKS-class orbital tug (they were intended to be manned, originally!) and park it at ISS to be used as-needed by crews you send when needed - then tow the thing back to the ISS to fix and relaunch. Give the ISS something USEFUL to do, limit the “shuttle” to precisely that: shuttling crew back and forth.
As to safety, suck it up and realize that you’ll only have so much of a window of conditions under which you can bail/eject/detach an escape pod and hope to live. As for an encapsulated “crew pod”-- what if it gets entangled in the wreckage of an exploding vehicle, rendering parachutes unusable? But then again, a much simpler spacecraft will have fewer things to go catastrophically wrong.
As ralph124c says, it does seem that the shuttle is far too large and complex because it tries to do many different jobs.
The shuttle is big because it has a huge payload bay, but usually the payload isnt brought back down again…
A much simpler system would be a small reusable Hermes type capsule to move people and a non-resuable system to shift stuff. On the rare occasions where people and stuff need to be together in space, arrange a rendevous.
I don’t think there’s any law against private companies developing spacecraft. In fact, what ever happened to that contest to do that very thing?
The problem, like anything, is money. Lockheed Martin does build spacecraft like the Titan II (http://www.lockheedmartin.com/spotlight/titan2.html) and private companies like Iridium http://www.iridium.com/ have their own satellites but to run a fully manned space program, they will want to return a much larger profit.
Space travel will not become anything more than a fringe industry until engines are developed that can launch a ship cheaper than the ACME rockets we currently use by a factor of 100. What makes the shuttle so expensive and unsafe is that it still operates within such tight tolerances and with such a small factor of safety that it doesn’t take much to create a catastrophic failure.
Considering what they’re doing, NASA has an incredible safety record. Astronauts realize that yes, there are some inherent dangers in strapping yourself to a missile, launching it into the most hostile environment possible, than re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere at over ten times the speed of sound.
Number of shuttle-related deaths in the over-twenty-years of the Shuttle, which travels far faster, a greater distance, and in far more dangerous environments than any other vehicle: 14, IIRC.
That boils down to about…3,004.64 automobile deaths for every shuttle death, to say nothing of the thousands of people injured in car accidents every year. Cars are too dangerous - let’s get rid of them and all the car manufacturers!
The point of NASA, and even more so of the ISS, is to AVOID the privatization/commercialization of space. Yes, that may come at some point, and I think that eventually, it will be commercialized, it’s inevitable. Right now, though, it’s such an unbelievable opportunity for scientific research, because things don’t act the same in microgravity. If NASA goes away, the ISS will suffer, becuase there won’t be an “American” space program. It’s the one chance we still have to toss international politics aside and learn something. Explore. That’s what made America what it is, that understanding that 'This is Z. We don’t know what it is. If we spend our time squabbling over who discovered it and who gets the money from it, we won’t be able to learn about it. So let’s study Z, and THEN worry about A through Y."
Many have tried and failed to do just that. Rotary Rocket, Beal Aerospace, and a few others have either failed to raise money or decided it wasn’t profitable.
Admittedly Beal blames the US government for providing unfair competition in the form of SLI. However, I don’t see why they would single out SLI when other governments are funding their own aerospace companies.
I think we just have to face the reality that space exploration and flight with current technology is both dangerous and expensive- period. Those are the two limitations- balancing factors i guess you could say. You can make it safer yes, but its gonna cost more. You can also make it cheaper, but it wont be as safe. I think NASA is doing the best they can with the current technology and funding available. Also, dont think that those brave astronauts didnt know the risks involved. They believed in the benefits of NASA and if they could tell you today i think they would agree that NASA is still a good thing and that accidents happen. Nobody intended this to happen, it was just a matter of the risks that are always involved with space travel.
I fail to see how you connect this verse to a scenario where China invades Taiwan. Are you saying our country should never help another country defend itself from a much larger neighbor?
(We should probably start another thread, instead of hijacking this one…)
(And yet, you just could not stop yourself, I reckon…)
Our government should defend its citizens from coercion. If its citizens wish to help Taiwan, then let them use their own resources to do so. If you want to fight someone, use your own fist — don’t grab mine.
Not really going to debate here, but I’ll toss something in that is relevant.
Isn’t the real issue with the shuttle that solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank? The shuttle itself seems only as good as it’s weakest supporting equipment.
I know the shuttle is a ‘system’, but the shuttle always impresses engineers, astronauts and NASA personell, but no one is lining up to sign their name onto the tanks and boosters.
The shuttle does offer a good space platform, and does it’s return fall/glide quite well, when it’s not been slammed by debris, or blown up by the boosters.
As a number of you have pointed out the shuttle is as big as it is because it does what it does. There would be merit in designing a number of different types of spacecraft but one must consider the goal of the space program. Gemini was supposed to put a man in space and bring him back safely. Apollo was to put men on the moon and bring them back safely. The Shuttle was designed to be a cargo ship to ferry men and material into space.
As to the comments concerning 20-year-old technology let me posit this. There are a number of different aircraft from supersonic jets to huge passenger crafts to single engine prop planes. Would any of you use an F-16 for a crop duster? Would you think of using a C-130 in a dogfight? How old are C-130s? How old are crop dusters? AM and FM radio use the same principles of modulation and demodulation since they were first introduced. How old is that technology? The wankle engine, how old is that technology? Saying something is old does should not be used to imply that that something is no longer useful or inappropriate for a given task let alone its intended use.
Saying the direction of NASA should be changed is quite different from saying that the approach they are taking to do what they are doing is wrong. Abolishing NASA for some ASTRA program would only return us to where we are now. Define a goal, build a spacecraft to achieve that goal, ship crashes, people complain about how old the technology is and then want to change to goal.
At the risk of sounding redundant I’ll repeat my previous comment with slight additions. The shuttle employs the state of the art method for a cargo ship to enter into and return from space. Without positing some other type of propulsion device or reentry device or redefining the goal of the space program it would not make sense to scrap the shuttle. Sure there could be improvements, updated computer systems and the like, but you will still be left with something that looks like and functions like the shuttle.
The one thing that keeps sticking in my head here, you honestly want to take some of the brightest people on the planet, blacklist them, and tell them they’ll never work again for doing what they were asked to do? My friend, that is the height of ignorance.
The problem I have with this mission was that it was a throwback to the days before the international space station when the shuttle was the only platform (besides Mir) available for scientific experiments in near-zero G.
Perhaps the shuttle should now only be used for those missions where its cargo bay is neccessary, i.e., supplying and building of the space station and servicing and retrieving satellites like Hubble.
To use it only for a mission to perform experiments duplicates what the space station was intended for and also puts the shuttle at a safety disadvantage.
Had the shuttle been on a mission to the station, it would have been much easier to inspect the bottom of the shuttle for damage (assuming the damage occurred sometime during or after launch). As it was, the shuttle was not capable of reaching the station, eliminating that as an option.
Okay, so if we toss out the shuttle what do we replace it with and how do we pay for it? NASA’s budget is a mere $15 billion and it has to fight tooth and nail for that pittance. If you scrap NASA, you can bet that whatever replaces it, will have less money to work with! So, not only will you have to build a new organization from scratch, you’ll have to do it with less money. In the meantime, valuable research in areas of spaceflight will have been stopped, while you’re reorganizing. That is by far the absolute worst thing that can happen. Period. Paragraph.
Even if you do manage to get as much scratch as NASA is currently alloted, you’re going to find that $15 billion doesn’t buy you a whole heck of a lot. Sure, there’s lots of possible designs out there that might be cheaper to operate than the current shuttles, but until you get one off the drawing board and into actual service, you can’t say for certain that it will be cheaper.
As for the shuttle being dangerous, name something that isn’t. No matter what kind of space craft you use, there’s always going to be an element of risk. One of the ways that NASA attempts to minimize the risk is by using the old technology. The reason is it that the old stuff tends to fail in a predictable manner, so you already know what can go wrong. Whereas, if you used newer stuff, without a long track record, you’d have lots of unexpected failures. Not a good thing.
Oh and JonScribe, many of the experiments done on Columbia’s last flight couldn’t have been done on the ISS at present. There’s simply not enough space or people onboard the ISS at this time for them to conduct a lot of experiments. That might change if NASA can get better funding, until then, we’re going to need the shuttles to do experiments in orbit.
Finally, there’s lots of groups out there trying to develop a reusable spacecraft for passenger flights. None of them have launched any as of yet, even though there’s a $10 million paycheck awaiting the first group to pull it off. (And many of them say that the paycheck won’t enable them to recoup their expenses.)