The Approach And Landing Tests started with five unmanned captive flights. (i.e., the Enterprise remained attached to the 747.) That was followed by three more captive flights with two-man crews. All five free-flights had crew aboard.
I’m not sure it’s entirely a bad things that are willing to risk their lives. Although theyd eserve the best engineering, if they weren’t willing to rsik their lives for a chance at great adventure, I’d be very sad for the human race.
Screw the “great adventure!” If they want fun they should pay for it themselves. If I’m paying for the space equivalent of a Mack truck I want the reliabilty of a Mack truck.
So, in short, no shuttle orbiter has ever been landed without a pilot, let alone deorbited without one.
Side commentary: Do you know why test flights are called pushing the envelope?
It’s because when you graph speed versus altitude, max speed and max altitude are at the top right corner of the graph.
That’s where envelopes get cancelled.
That said, I think it is time and past time space travel was beyond being experimental. But, well, it’s still in the X-stage. The Shuttles were a boondoggle from day one, and a better craft has been needed since the first flight.
But, I think, only twice has the orbiter been de-orbited under human control. It’s extrememly difficult, and so, up until the final couple minutes of the glide from orbit, the landing procedure is completely automated. The capability already exists to make the entire landing from orbit to ground completely automated. The Shuttle doesn’t really need people at all.
The notion that the Shuttle is “a Mack truck” is a fallacy perpetrated by NASA and Rockwell upon Congress and the American public. The Shuttle is, in fact, a technology development platform which is being used as a transport and delivery vehicle; worse yet, they build four more, with mostly the same flaws as the original model.
Nonetheless, we need an astronaut corps who are willing to accept risk in the furtherence of the technology of manned spaceflight, presuming, of course, that we consider manned spaceflight to be a desireable goal. But Shuttling people to NEO and back for the sake of performing high school experiements and supporting a space station, which exists primarily to justify the Shuttle supporting it, is a foolish risk that largely fails to advance scientific or technical knowledge.
Stranger
Well now you’ve gone and let the cat out of the bag. Good job. Are you proud of yourself?
Stranger
Is this a joke? It was my understanding that the ‘flight envelope’ is the set of conditions that fully contain those expected for a given flight or craft. “Pushing the limits” of that envelope would be to operate in conditions near or beyond the defined limits.
IE, if a plane is designed to fly at speeds from 0-300 km/h, at altitudes of 0-60,000 feet, and at accelerations of -3 to +7 G, the flight envelope is a 3-space with its limits at the values given. One is “pushing the envelope” when one operates at combinations of conditions close to or beyond those limits.
Similarly, one of the aircraft I fly has a “loading envelope” that is roughly triangular when Load at Position A is plotted against Load at Position B.
Is that not where this comes from?
John Glenn vacated his Senate chambers in 1998.
I just “vacated the Senate chambers” myself. Ahhh.
It’s hard to say which term came first. I understand, from those Air Force and Army Air Corps pilots I know, that the ‘canceled’ definition, like ‘buying a farm’, is a driving force behind the adoption of it in the test pilot community. (Okay, my Dad, his friends, and my mother’s father. But my grandfather did know it, the last time I asked.)
http://www.nd.edu/~ndmag/w2001-02/wondering.html
Hm. So it was originated in the test pilot community.
The whole manned space program makes no sense to me; the Space Shuttle is a 1970s-vintage space bus, and the ISS is just some place to drive it to.
If we’re going to have a manned space program, it should have some better goals than that.
It should also have a spacecraft that (whatever improvements may have been grafted on) is based on technology more recent than that of the Nixon Administration.
But really, I see no need for a manned space program at all. And given our ability to go from the pre-satellite era to a moon landing in 12 years during the 1950s and 60s, I see no need for us to maintain a manned space program ‘just in case.’ If a genuine need arises, we’ll be able to get our act together pretty quickly.
I’d say it’s worse. By sucking up funds from the meager space exploration budget that would be far more fruitfully spent on robotic probes and space telescopes, these ultrasonic paperweights have hindered the advance of scientific knowledge.
Well, sometimes “mature” technologies are a lot more effective than bleeding edge ones. Russia’s Big Dumb Boosters (as they were disparagely referred to before we realized, after Challenger’s crackup, that they’re also effective) have been the savior and mainstay of our joint efforts. A good space program would maintain and improve existing designs, as we did with Mercury/Gemini/Apollo, while spending efforts into developing the next generation of spaceflight technologies. The blunder of the Shuttle isn’t that it was a bad idea; it’s that NASA (owing to self-preservation in the post-Space Race environment and budget restrictions from 1970 through the early Reagan-era) placed all of its needs and plans for manned spaceflight into one vehicle, which turns out to be flawed (as any new design will be) and nonscalable. Even codeveloping an unmanned heavy booster off of Shuttle propulsion hardware, such as the proposed Ares booster/SDLV (see ATK’s proposed ETS) would have been good step. Instead, NASA has insisted that the Shuttle is for lofting people and cargo simultaneously.
There’s an argument to be made here–certainly, post-Cold War justifications based upon commerical technology investment, scientific value of manned spaceflight, et cetera don’t hold water any better than fishnet pantyhose–but I don’t personally agree with it. You could say the same about unmanned flight, and indeed, any scientific or exploratory research that isn’t applications based. So what if their are crazy sulfur-eating bacteria in the ocean? So what if the Mountain Zebra isn’t actually a zebra? So what if the universe is 13.7 billion years old? These aren’t questions that give us brighter lightbulbs or stronger teeth or eliminate the dreaded static cling.
But they do expand our knowledge of the universe, from its furthest reaches to its smallest crannies; they do offer a new viewpoint by which to see the world and our place in it; they do offer us new opportunities, challenges, and frontiers. Like great art, it appeals to our desire to connect beyond the limitations of our integumentary containers. And someday, perhaps, we might find that the knowledge we pursued out of pure curiosity ends up being our key to erudation and salvation. This isn’t something you can justify as a ROI on a balance sheet, but then, neither is love or war.
Personally, I just like the cutaway diagrams of shiny '60s-era spacecraft concepts, with the little astronauts eating food jelly from tubes and playing Pong on massive computer workstations. Nostalgia for the days when everything was bright and new, I guess.
Stranger
The RTF guidelines specified that NASA must have a second shuttle capable of being launched within a short period of time, before sending up the first shuttle. Now, the shuttle can remain in orbit for 14 days, IIRC, with the typical provisioning, and could probably stay up a day or two longer than that, with careful managing of resources (put them in an Apollo 13 type scenerio, where everything that’s not needed for talking with the ground or keeping the crew alive is powered down, and you might be able to get even longer time), as for the ISS, I don’t remember what the original full crew compliment was supposed to be, but adding a full shuttle load of folks is going to start putting a crimp in things. The shuttle resupply missions do carry a good chunk of food for the astronauts stationed on the ISS, and they’ve been growing and eating food up there, so they wouldn’t starve, though their caloric intake might not be as high as they’d like, but oxygen’s going to be a problem. Too many people up there for too long is going to put a strain on things and they’ll wind up “breathing their socks.” So, as a WAG, I’d say that they probably wouldn’t want to keep the guys up there for more than a month.
Of course, one problem that no one’s really looked at, is that there’s all sorts of wiring in the shuttle which hasn’t been checked out in ages, since it’s so difficult to get to, and if it turns out that Discovery has a serious problem in that wiring, and Atlantis has the smae number of flight hours or more as Discovery, then you’re left with the question: Do we risk sending up another potentially bad shuttle to try and save the crew?
Even worse is that NASA’s now saying, “We don’t know what the hell to do about the foam.”
Just a thought, but how about using a real big version of Stranger’s fishnet pantyhose to hold the chunks on?
I agree that the space program should have a better, more ambitious set of goals, but I think those goals should include both manned and unmanned mission agendas. We should not only be sending Von Neumann probes into deep space by the hundred, we should also be much more aggressively working toward human exploration, colonization and settlement of Mars.
It’d probably weigh too much.
Or we could use a really big condom. We could stamp it ‘MEDIUM’. 