If the Space Shuttles are now obsolete(too old to be safe) how will we send up NEW satellites when t

Factual Questions
21

The ISS was not designed to rotate for several reasons. For one, rotating something that large would create a lot of stress, which would have required everything to be built heavier and would have caused the cost to skyrocket. For another, imposing artificial gravity screws up your experiments. So then you’d need a non-rotating part. The interface between the two would create vibrations. Finally, if you make artificial gravity by spinning something that small, you wind up with all kinds of problems from coriolis forces. For rotation to be a good, non-vertigo inducing substitute for gravity, you need a big circle. A really big circle. We’re nowhere near the capability of that.

Some of the more useful research done on ISS has been to look for exercise methods that would allow long-term stay in zero-G without degredation.

But by and large, ISS is a white elephant that was so compromised over the years that it’s not much good. I believe the American commitment to it is still scheduled to be eliminated by 2016 or so. Until then, Americans will be riding up on Soyuz, unless SpaceX can get their Dragon capsule tested and man-rated in time.

22

[Moderator Note]

socalscot, political commentary of this kind is not suitable for GQ. No warning issued, but don’t do this again.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

23

There’s no point to the ISS besides zero-g study. If you’ve got an experiment that can be done in gravity, it’s much, much cheaper and easier to just do it on Earth. And “microgravity” is a misnomer born of a peculiar combination of ignorance and over-erudition; whenever people say “microgravity”, they mean “zero gravity”.

24

Things put into space have to be designed to stand 3 or 4 G’s during launch and being vibrated like hell in the process. These are often compression loads as well. Once in space you have sedate 1 to sub 1 G load, no large vibrations, and loads in tension (which are much better than loads in compression engineering wise). Something designed to be spun isnt going to have to built like a brick shithouse compared to a zero G lab. Designed differently yes? Massively built? No IMO.

Do zero G experiments in a true zero G place. Not a place like ISS where humans and the machinery are causing vibrations all the time. ISS is the worst of both worlds. Humans degrade, and it really isnt zero G for stuff like crystal growth.

Yes on the coriolis forces. But again, like a sub 1 G environment, we have no idea of how much coriolis force a human can stand long term, particuarly in sub 1 G environments.

As for a giant structure you don’t NEED a massive rotating ring if you decide your rotation rate needs to be 1RPM but the radius of rotation needs to be 100 feet. (due to coriolis forces). Two small modules separated by 200 foot of cable rotating about the center of mass will do just fine. No need to build a giant doughut 200 feet across with circumference of 600 feet.
Yeah, none of this stuff is trivial, but compared to the engineering of massive rockets, REUSABLE flying spacecraft like the Space Shuttle, and landing men on the moon for Pete’s sake (40 fracking years ago!!) ,I remain wholley unconvinced that with the amount of money we’ve spent dicking around in low earth orbit in the decades since, having astronauts sweating to the oldies in the Shuttle and MIR and the ISS, that we could instead have answered the simple question of “how many G’s do we need to survive medium/long term in space?” by building SOMETHING that rotates Goddamint…

25

I worked on ISS experiments at ESA, and, whatever the origin of the term, ‘microgravity’ is exactly how it’s described at the Agency. See the use in this article, or in the name of this facility aboard ISS. In fact, the staff posting I was hired for was titled “Development of microgravity payloads”.

Of course, with all the vibrations on the ISS, the actual acceleration spectrum felt by the experiments is usually in the milli-g’s, which is why we need facilities like the Microgravity Vibration Isolation Subsystem, to reduce the level to something more acceptable.

Anyway, it’s true that people sometimes argue about the appropriate use of the terms ‘weightlessness’, ‘zero-gravity’, and ‘microgravity’. ‘Zero-g’ gets countered in these discussions because the acceleration environment isn’t zero, and is in fact significantly non-zero, to the point that we have to take special care and build special systems to keep that from affecting the experiments. The other objection is that objects in orbit, even free of vibration sources, are still affected by gravity. They feel a gravitational acceleration that keeps them in orbit, even if they don’t feel weight. Hence, the convention in the circles I’ve worked in has been to discuss experiment facilities in terms of ‘microgravity’, and the condition felt by objects or astronauts in orbit as ‘weightlessness’.

26

OK, so it’s a very widespread misnomer; I won’t argue with that.

27

socalscot:
Perhaps some of the responders should have done their online research BEFORE posting… A few have stated that rockets are basically the only thing used today to launch satellites, and one said the last satellite launch was in 1999. PLEASE check out this website:

Now before you say “…but Wikipedia is dependent on everyday people for their info…” PLEASE look at their sources(that can be clicked on and confirmed).
Also to those who have written that NASA has only contributed to the knowledge of 0 gravity on humans and other life, PLEASE see THESE websites(the page I looked at was ONLY about the recent Medical advances due to the space program, they provide access to all or most of the Med. advances–I’m going to look into the Tech. side which may be even more numerous):

www.medlineplus.gov and www.niams.nih.gov
THEN type “NASA” into either of the websites search box.
(the reason for my quoting Francis Vaughn’s post? His insult was UNCALLED FOR AND not true)

28

oops! The word “shuttle” didn’t make it all the way on on the first website, so here it is:

Also, my original question still stands based on my info on my last post.

29

Umm, which post 1999 shuttle mission launched a sattelite? I don’t see any in the link you provided. They’re all ISS or Hubble missions, as other posters said.

And it doesn’t really matter regarding your question in any case, even if the Shuttle was used to launch a satellite last Tuesday, the fact is that rockets have been used to do so previous to the Shuttle, during the lifetime of the shuttle, and they will be used to do so once the shuttle is retired.

30

socalscot, I’m not seeing your point there. Your links confirm that the last satellite launched by the Space Shuttle was indeed in 1999, just as Francis Vaughan said. And even if what he had said were incorrect (it wasn’t), it still wouldn’t be an insult.

31

Did you read that list? It says that the last satellite launch was in 1999. All of the later shuttle missions were either to build/service the ISS, two missions to service Hubble, and a handful of general science missions. Can you point to a mission after STS-93 that launched a satellite?

Granter, before the Challenger accident the shuttle launched many satellites. But the Shuttle phased out of the commercial launch business over the next few years, and other heavy-lift rockets took up the slack (probably at a cheaper cost once you discount NASA’s subsidies…)

Dude, I’m big fan of basic biological and medical research (it’s what I do for a living!). I’m also a big fan of space exploration – I was a particularly big space cadet as a kid. With that in mind, let me state clearly that I believe the Shuttle and the ISS have been a hugely expensive and very inefficient way to do research. I’ve read a few of the publications on biological experiments done in space. Most consist of “let’s see what happens to this organism in zero g”, followed by (say) high resolution gene expression data of stuff that was sent up on the shuttle. Not very enlightening stuff, comparatively speaking. Most of the spinoff medical technologies in your cites either date to the very early days of NASA or only have tenuous connections to the later space program. (I will grant that we learned lots about the extremes of human physiology as we were first figuring how to get humans into space, but that was decades ago)

If you’re interested in funding medical research, the NIH is a much more efficient conduit than NASA ever could be. For every biological experiment you do on the ISS, you could have funded tens or hundreds of more relevant experiments here on Earth.

Also the shuttle was never a good vehicle for human space exploration. Messing around in Low Earth Orbit really only taught us how to mess around in LEO slightly more efficiently. As other posters have mentioned, there’s lots we have to learn before even beginning to attempt human spaceflight beyond the Moon. We haven’t been doing those experiments on the Shuttle or the ISS, and really need to come up with new spacecraft so we can.

32

Furthering this, here’s a list of US military satellite launches. Only 12 of 211 launches were on the Shuttle, and none since 1993. They’re getting along just fine using other heavy launch rockets (and intriguingly, the Air Force is testing a new unmanned space plane for some secret purpose).

33

[Moderator Note]

Francis Vaughan, insults are not permitted in GQ. Since this is pretty mild, no warning issued, but don’t do this again.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

34

Thank you to those with on topic answers. I wasn’t aware rockets are still used for satellite payloads…should have used Google for that. I DO want those of you whom have stated that NASA/shuttle/Moon exploration hasn’t really benefited us much to look at the websites I provided. They are eye-openers if you think very little has been contributed. Possibly you’re younger than me and haven’t grown up with knowing some of these
things that were in Newspapers and books? (are those things still in existence??)
Another website is:
http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/pdf/Shuttle_spinoffs.pdf (or google “nasa technologies on everyday life”
http://space.about.com (type in search box, (“apollo spinoffs”) These are inventions only from the apollo missions.
Maybe I’ll start a thread on this…
socalscot

35

Who would that be? I see one post stating that “[t]here’s very little useful medical research on the ISS or the Shuttle”, which is true. But there are certainly many other fields of science and engineering that benefited, and I don’t think anyone here would deny that.

36

Spinoff threads:

Apollo Program’s patent revenue
Economists & Apollo 11, et al.
NASA’s balance sheet
How has space travel helped life on earth?
NASA technology…
Tangible benefits of space exploration?

37

:dubious:

38

Spinoff technologies are a nice but minor side benefit of the space program. But if you’re only interested in these technologies, there are better ways to fund applied research. NASA has spent $416 billion over its history, and here on earth we now have a handful of new useful technologies. That’s a very poor return on the taxpayer’s investment. If you just want government research into applied technologies, you would get a hell lot more for a tenth of the cost by funding agencies like the NSF or DARPA.

But NASA clearly does a lot more than a bit of terrestrial applied engineering and medical research. The Apollo program was a triumph and probably the greatest piece of exploration in all of history. Robotic probes have given us a decades-long torrent of amazing information and science. That’s continuing today with missions like Cassini and the Mars rovers. And there are also the “Great Observatories” like Hubble and its successors. A bit more prosaically, NASA has also done a lot of quality research focused on our own planet’s atmosphere, oceans, and geology (that comes with the first A in the acronym).

But the Shuttle is another case. What has it really accomplished? Thirty years of messing around in low earth orbit. That was old news by the end of the Gemini program. It was a nifty idea conceptually, but by the time the design was complete the program was a mess of compromises and budget overruns and pork. Why bother with a reusable space plane if you’ve got to rebuild (at great cost!) the whole damn thing after every mission? It’d be cheaper to go with single-use capsules. There are tons of examples of poor compromises in the Shuttle’s design. One example was that the Air Force originally wanted to use the shuttle, so it was designed with greater re-entry capabilities that would allow it to take off and land within a single orbit. That required bigger wings, larger maneuvering surfaces, more weight, all of which made the Shuttle more fragile and expensive. That might have been an acceptable tradeoff – except that the Air Force pulled out of the Shuttle program after the design was finalized. It turns out that, among other things, the final Shuttle design wasn’t capable of launching the sorts of satellites that the military was interested in. But the design compromises remained. Wiki has a long (and well cited) article on criticisms of the Shuttle program.

So the human space exploration part of NASA’s mission really hasn’t gone anywhere since the end of Apollo. Where do we go next? Well, there’s not much worth doing in LEO in terms of research or exploration. Let the private companies figure out better ways to commercialize satellite launches and possibly human activities in LEO (I’m looking at you, SpaceX…) If we want to continue human space exploration, we need a new destination and new research that gives us the capabilities to reach that destination. The shuttle was a dead end. The ISS is a dead end. Constellation was sort of a dead end: it was supposed to give us better heavy launch capability so we could launch heavy stuff to… go back to the moon?

I’m actually cautiously optimistic about the NASA’s new direction. Instead of sinking huge amounts of money into something that’s clearly been a dead end for the last decade or three, they’re funding lots of development into “flagship technology demonstrations” that just might give us the capabilities we’d need for future human spaceflight.

So NASA is not dead. Human space flight is on hold, but it’s not like we’ve been doing anything useful or informative in LEO (besides learning that long-term zero-G is bad for humans, and all-purpose space planes are a bad idea).

39

Minor nitpick: I believe by “Titan V” that you actually mean the Atlas V space launch vehicle (SLV). The Titan production line (and production of the gigantic Titan SRMU boosters) was stopped in 2002-2003, and the final flight of a Titan SLV (a “commercial” Titan IVB) occurred in 2005. This was largely due to the cost of Titan production and having to handle the corrosive and toxic fuel and oxidizer, and also the availability of heavy launch vehicles in the Altas and Delta families coming into production.

The American Space Transportation System, colloquially known as “the Shuttle”, consisting of the Orbiter Vehicle (OV), the [Redesigned/Reusable] Solid Rocket Motors (SRM, and post-Challenger, RSRM), and the External Tank (ET), was intended both to succeed the Saturn family of man-rated heavy and super-heavy SLVs, and to supplant (and later completely replace) the then ICBM and IRBM based SLVs; the Thor IRBM-based Delta family (Thor, Thrust Augmented Thor, Thor-Able, Thor-Ablestar, Thor-Agena, Thor-Delta, and finally the Delta), Titan (“commercial” Titan II, III, and IV, and the converted Titan 23 and Titan 34), and Atlas (Atlas E/F-G-H, Atlas SLV-3, Atlas-Vega, Atlas-Able, Atlas-Centaur). The ostensible reasons for this was that the weapon-based SLVs were expensive to operate and maintain, did not meet modern range safety standards, and use could cause conflict with SALT arms limitation agreements, but the reality is that even during the final concept phase it became apparent that the “reusable” Shuttle system would at best be cost comparable to existing expendable heavy launch systems, and that given only the aggressive 24 launches per year schedule. The real reason for shutting down expendable SLV production was to prevent comparison between ELVs and the STS, and force military, research, and commercial payloaders to use the Shuttle. (Laws in place at the time prohibited the use of foreign SLVs for US-based commercial payloads; and we obviously weren’t going to fly surveillance satellites on Soviet or Chinese launchers.)

The USAF, despite nominally signing up to use and even operate the STS “Blue Shuttle”, flying out of VAFB off of the infamous Space Launch Complex 6 (SLC-6 or “Slick Six”) and levying cross-range requirements for a once-around polar orbit return to launch site that drove the wingspan and amount of exposed leading edge, didn’t really want the Shuttle and continued to maintain low level development of a replacement ELV that could be brought on line quickly in case the Shuttle was grounded. Curiously, one of these ELV proposals was based on a five-segment the Shuttle SRMs, and is essentially what became the Ares I rocket for the Constellation program.

As it turned out, Shuttle launch costs and availability were prohibitive, and the destruction of Challenger 73 seconds into STS-51-L gave the air force the excuse it needed to abandon the STS and return to and expand the Titan, Delta, and Atlas based ELVs, and fund proposal and research for the next generation of expendable launch vehicles, the Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle program, which begat the current Delta IV and Atlas V (which despite the continuation of naming systems, have no hardware or design specifications in common with the original Thor-Delta and Atlas SLV ystems).

In addition to these systems, there are a number of other space launch systems used for satellite launch available today. Orbital Sciences Corporation produces vehicles for commercial and military use, including the air-launch three-stage Pegasus (Orion solid rocket motors), the four stage Taurus I (a Pegasus sans wing on top of a Castor 120 SRM), the Minotaur family (SLVs based upon surplussed Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBM lower stacks with Orion upper stages and optional solid or liquid orbital insertion motors). Solid rocket motor manufacturer Alliant Techsystems and Lockheed-Martin offer launchers based on the Castor 120. Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) offers the Falcon 1 and Falcon 9, if you don’t mind taking a role of the dice on a nascent launch vehicle. And there are a number of launch systems from China, Russia, France, Japan, India, et cetera based on demil’d ICBMs or purpose-designed space launch vehicles.

As has been demonstrated, the STS hasn’t carried satellites or space probes to orbit in over a decade, and was never either cost-competitive or schedule reliable for that purpose; it exists today almost exclusively to service the ISS. The STS isn’t being taken out of service because of “age and normal flight stress”; in fact, the two oldest Shuttles have been destroyed, and the remainder of the fleet has seen half or less of the minimum design lifespan of 50 flights. The reason for retiring the Shuttle fleet is that there are a number of design deficiencies–and specifically, the elaborate and maintenance-intensive thermal protection system–which limits the reliability of the STS below what would be considered acceptable for man-rating on any other vehicle. In addition, it simply has not been competitive with purely expendable systems in terms of cost, even at the highest launch rates.

Regarding generating apparent gravity by designing a rotating station: in addition to the complexities mentioned below (stress, criticality in case of failure, the complexity of a non-rotating joint to attached to), the largest problems with a rotating station are assembly, and station-keeping. You couldn’t assemble a rotating station piecemeal for the same reason that you don’t let kids jump on and off an operating merry-go-round, which means you’d have to assemble the entire thing and then put it in rotation. We’ve been assembling the ISS for about the past twelve years, and still isn’t complete. It was designed to be modular and accommodate configuration changes during construction and development, whereas a rotation station would have to be carefully regulated by requirements and verification across all participants to maintain appropriate mass properties. And even slight inertial imbalances (from moving mass around inside) and tidal influences would cause precession and nutation, causing it to point and wobble and requiring thusters, flywheels, or both to correct its orientation and damp out gyrations which takes energy and propellant. There is nothing conceptually difficult about spinning a body to create internal centrifugal acceleration, but the engineering details of doing this with a large enough structure to serve as an operating habitat are really complex and haven’t been previously done on anything like this scale.

However inaccurate it may be in pure physics terms, “microgravity” is the jargon used in the aerospace community in regard to freefall environments where the only significant gravitational influences on an isolated body are tidal effects. Gravity at LEO is, of course, a substantial fraction of surface-level gravity, as can be seen by how satellites continue to orbit and how difficult it is to push things further away from the Earth.

I’m not going to delve into the whole “what innovations has the manned space program produced” other than to point out that most of the claimed innovations already existed and were implemented by NASA or subcontractors for use in the program. Microelectronics, inertial guidance systems, medical remote monitoring devices, et cetera were all adaptations, not innovations. There are compelling reasons to maintain and expand a space exploration program, but near-term fiscal return isn’t one of them.

Stranger

40

Shortly after I voiced cautious optimism for Obama’s new direction for NASA, it now looks like the senate is considering legislation to reverse all of the new ideas. There’s a new bill in the works that will require NASA to have a few more Shuttle launches, develop a new heavy lift rocket (mostly by picking up Constellation again), while axing funding for new technology development and robotic exploration. And there are specific provisions that require NASA to use current facilities and specific contractors while blocking out newer private companies. Unsurprisingly, this bill is sponsored by the senators with the aforementioned facilities and contractors in their districts.

Or, paraphrasing, “Screw you Obama, NASA is going to blow its budget to build the biggest and most expensive rocket possible, and the money goes right to our districts.”

If I said anything more on this topic I’d probably veer straight past GD territory and end up in the Pit. Suffice to say, it’s an excellent example of why NASA’s problems have very little to do with any president.