I think the Space Shuttle is cool. Space in general is cool. But the Space Shuttle was meant to a safe, boring, routine, commercial truck to get into low-Earth orbit.
With that as the standard, the Shuttle is a failure.
It is fine as a sort of risky, exciting, paramilitary thing, but is too dangerous and too expensive to open up LEO to commercial use.
So let’s just admit that the Shuttle is a failed experiment, one that has taught us a lot of important lessons and it is now time to move on.
I agree, but have two additional points. First, the whole manned space program, since Apollo, has been a failure, and I think always will be. Second, LEO is already open to commercial use, no thanks to the shuttle.
The thing is NASA is not the best way to get us Up There. NASA should simply be a customer who pays Boeing, Advanced Composites or Someone Else to build space stuff. No design, just a customer.
What comes next should be pretty darn cool.
Yes and no. 98% reliability is probably not acceptable for routine human spaceflight, so in that sense, you’re correct, the Shuttle is a failure. However, for cargoes, that’s not too shabby. What NASA should do is strip out all the life support systems, and reconfigure the Shuttle as an unmanned launch vehicle. This would not be difficult: The Shuttle is already capable of unmanned flight. The only mods to be made would be for the sake of economy, since you don’t need to support a crew any more. Then, use the Shuttles up. Just keep launching them until they all fail one way or another. This will not only get a hundred or so more heavy launches out of the old design, it will also teach us important and needed lessons about spaceflight. Every time one fails, it’ll alert us to that problem, and enable us to prevent that problem from repeating on a later flight (manned or unmanned). And it’ll do so without loss of life.
Meanwhile, of course, NASA needs to design and build a new vehicle for carrying humans into space. But without the burden of heavy cargoes, this crew vehicle could be made much simpler and more reliable, as well as cheaper.
I like the idea of de-certifying the Shuttle for manned flight. I like it a lot.
I question if NASA should be in the business of designing anything however. I say pay other people to design stuff.
Where the unmanned shuttle as you describe (same boat without life support) fails is in expense. Too many compromises were made to support human life and there will probably be loads of wasted space and excess weight. Something designed from the ground up is better, cheaper, and more economical to run. All modular–power plant, controls, and wings that you plug a shipping container into before launch–is the ticket.
And Paul, that’s like my attitude when people want me to make stuff. Nope, I’m paid to design stuff and there are other people who are paid to build it. I don’t say it out loud; I try real hard to build it right but my craftsmanship speaks for itself. 
Heh, in my opinion NASA should be privatized and sold off.
As far as manned spaceflight, I don’t think that they were a failure. We’ve just lost our cojones as a civilization. If 98% success rate were considered a failure when people were exploring the seas, we’d never have connected continents. We need to grow some bigger stones IMO. That’s the real failure.
Erek
Chronos summed everything up pretty much perfectly. We’ve got the Space Truck, and it can carry some whopping payloads. The thing takes off like any other rocket, and lands on autopilot. Humans are superfluous for the purpose of carrying standard payloads into space. Russian Soyuz craft can be used to ferry a skeleton crew to-and-from the ISS, and without a safe transport and lifeboat that can carry more than two or three people, that’s all the ISS warrants. Frankly, I’d let that go too and cut our losses.
The one exception I’d make is for the Hubble Space Telescope. I’d fix the one we’ve got now and launch another one just like it over keeping the massive white elephant that is the ISS manned. But now NASA has to scuttle the HST over old gyros, which astronauts have replaced, and can again. A single manned mission a year to service the HST is, IMO, a reasonable use of the Shuttle as part of a manned space program until we have a replacement vehicle. The risk of losing astronauts would be far less than if we flew them unnecessarily on every mission.
Why is it so horrible for astronauts to die once in a while? More people have died in the war on terror than have even been into space, yet we don’t seem to be stopping war. I’d like to see a comparison of astronaut casualties to other industries where heavy machinery is operated.
The difference is that there isn’t a purpose to the manned space program (well, I guess that’s not really a difference). The problem is not so much that we have occasional loss of life, but that our exploration of space is being held back because, for some reason, some people seem to want humans to be up there. That’s not awful in and of itself, but it adds a huge amount of complexity, and takes away from what is feasible, for no real benefit.
The reason losing astronauts is such a big deal, when anybody who is familiar with the early forms of transportation tech expect more than a few corpses along the way, is that they die on TV. A few more GIs screaming as their lifeblood ran out on the 6PM news and we’d be out of Iraq, I gay-ron-tee.
It’s actually Scaled Composites (if you are referring to Burt Rutan’s operation), and for the most part design work isn’t done by NASA but by contractors and subcontracters, and merely managed or overseen by NASA. FWIW, Boeing is really trying to get out of the business of building space hardware and into being just a Prime Contractor; ditto for Northrop Grumman, and less so for Lockheed. Your actual fabricators and integrators these days are companies like Scaled Composites and Orbital Sciences, but they don’t have the political might or wherewithall to obtain a prime contract and run a major program themselves.
Chronos pretty much hits the nail on the head with regard to the Shuttle, but a couple of extra points to consider:
Everybody knew that the Shuttle was a compromise. NASA was forced to kill Apollo specifically to prevent a translunar human travel program that would have been very costly, and didn’t have the budget to develop both a new heavy lift booster AND a personnel transport, so they combined two into one. There was much grumbling, particularly among the advocates of an SSTO (single stage to orbit) reusable rocket as a people mover, but in the end it was decided that the Shuttle, warts and all, was better than nothing.
It’s a bit precipitous to refer to the Shuttle as a failure. Although the failure rate is higher than we’d like to accept, it has actually safely put more bodies in space than any other mode of transport. The failures–the SRB O-rings on Challenger and the insulation failure on Columbia–were as much a failure of the “Can Do!/No Problems Here!” culture that NASA has developed. People are afraid to criticize, as it as seen as a “risk” to career. Back in the good old days (according to people I work with who worked on Apollo) they took a lot of physical risks, but one could skirt around the chain of command and expose a problem with little fear of reprecussion if justified. Today, the attitude is reversed; they want an assessment zero physical risks, even if it means ignoring potential problems. Linda Ham, in all of her teary-eyed evasions, was exactly the sort of manager NASA has cultivated–risk adverse, head up arse, domineering and bombastic.
The Shuttle is essentially a test platform put into service. Unlike Apollo, which was a direct evolution from the earlier Redstone and Titan-based rockets of Mercury and Gemini, the Shuttle was a brand-new platform with all sorts of new, untested engineering solutions. No one, not even the Soviets, had or have since used solid rocket boosters for man-rated propulsion. The combination of the Shuttle main engines and the SRBs have very odd, offset dynamics that are difficult to compensate for, unlike the inline enginees of the older rocket-stack platforms or the much simpler Russian Buran Shuttle. The use of heat-absorbing tiles instead of an ablative shield was unique and untried. The Shuttle itself is seriously complex, and at the same time, antiqudated in its computer and flight control systems before it ever left the ground. (It has since been upgraded.) Given the conditions under which the Shuttle evolved and has operated, it’s actually kind of surprising that there haven’t been more failures.
As The Master points out in this column, the Shuttle, the ISS, and the manned space program have all become a kind of incestuous tautological justification for each other. I don’t fully agree with Cecil that manned spaceflight is unnecessary, but the justification should be the furtherence of manned spaceflight beyond Low Earth Orbit, not some public relations voodoo about spin-offs and vital research that could be done by trained monkeys. The ISS is a giant boondoggle that exists more of the sake of appearances of international cooperation than any scientific merit. A Moonbase is only slightly more justifiable, and a manned Mars mission is nonsense at this point.
A better goal would be the capture and exploitation of a near Earth asteroid for resources. Although the cost of such a venture would be enormous, the payoff (in terms of resources returned–all downhill) would be tremendous. The problem with that is, if you bring a 100 tonne lump of platinum back to Earth, you are going to drop the bottom out of the platinum market…making your resource “worthless” in economic terms (but valuable as an absolute resource). Space exploration really doesn’t sell as a profit enterprize; it’s too long term, too risky of a return, and many variables on what the return will actually be worth, hence the need for a government funded space program. So, you’re left with a sword that is nice and sharp on both sides; the need for nonprofit (i.e. government) funding and motivation on one edge, and political grandstanding and policy making on the other.
The Shuttle always had a limited lifespan, in terms of obsolescence, and we should have had something five years ago to replace it, or at least be beyond the concept stage. Instead, NASA cancelled the X programs (after running it into the ground by insisting that the programs develop not just conceptual test articles but actual flight-worthy or scaled designs), and is now scrambling to come up with an Apollo-like vehicle, the CEV, which is even more of a step backward, IMHO. And they continue to gut unmanned space programs that do good returns on science knowledge for fractions of a percent of what manned programs cost. :rolleyes:
And don’t believe for a minute that this Administration has any interest in putting a man on Mars, or indeed has any desire to find life on Mars at all. The ulterior motives aren’t hard to spot, and they all point to another competition with the new bear. Meanwhile, Hubble prepares to plunge to destruction, despite all of the backlog of valuable work it could continue to do for the forseeable future if maintained.
Stranger
Whajamean, there is oil up in them Martian hills! Actually Bush has stated many times about the importantance of space exploration, it is clear he is fascinated by manned space flight and would like to see a clear domance of the US in space again.
The Shuttle program is not a total failure, it proves that a reusable space plane is possiable and have layed the groundwork for future space planes.
This post comes closest to revealing the truth of the situation.
No one in China who is talking the way the nay-sayers in this thread are talking is getting anyone’s ear, nowadays. They have a vibrant space program that is the toast of the nation. As the current nominee for NASA chair has put it, how will you feel when the American flag that Armstong and Aldrin planted on the moon is sitting in a museum in Beijing? It’s a matter of national pride.
The only problem the US space program has ever had is small minds in charge. The shuttle as it exists grew of the idiotic notion that the pittance, the less-than-a-penny-per-federal-budget-dollar that this country spends on space somehow has to justify itself in terms of profitability. In that sense only is the shuttle a failure, in that space traffic was supposed to generate some income, which dissapeared when the costs were high and other rocket options proved easier. But anyone who thought that was the only reason for the shuttle was missing the point.
What people seem to constantly forget is that NASA doesn’t know how to do any of the things it does for sure until it does them. Many who want us to go to Mars ask why we don’t simply make a beeline for it, as though the support system for the entire 2.5-year journey is a matter of picking it out at the travel agent’s. The whole point of the shuttle and the ISS is to determine what happens to us during long-term exposure to microgravity, as a means of figuring out what such support systems entail. Anything else that goes on with them is a nod to the penny-pinchers.
And these were never meant to be final technologies anyway. It is useless to speculate about what happens in a microgravity environment on a space station serviced regularly by shuttles if you don’t know if you can create the station or provide the shuttle service. Similarly with the HST. The point of all three was not to show that their tasks could be done perfectly or efficiently, but that they could be done AT ALL. None were meant to be permanent technologies, but first steps from which lessons could be learned for future steps. Those lessons having been learned, NASA has beeen waiting years for a government with the gonads to give the go-ahead for the next generation of stuff.
They almost got there, too. The Crew Return Vehicle, which would have provided the necessary escape route to enable a full seven-member crew for the ISS, was also to have given the technology direction for the next generation shuttle. Bush scrapped it almost before his butt was finished warming his Oval Office chair. I can only assume it was the reaction this move got back home in Houston that made him eventually find religion about the manned space program.
I don’t know how many threads I’ve done this in, but here we go again:
Mars is roughly a 2.5 year mission, just to land someone there and bring them back. That’s six months in zero-gravity, almost two years waiting in very low gravity for Earth and Mars to line up for a minimum-energy-cost return flight, and six months home, plus enough fuel and provisions for the journey, including whatever countermeasures are necessary for whatever physiological effects all his time outside of Earth gravity has on the crew. We don’t know for sure how to do any of this yet because we’ve barely started trying.
To figure out how to do this, you need two things: a moon base and a centrifuge module in space. The moon base to try out various provisioning schemes and life-support scenarios somewhere with a nice, comfy three-day evacuation journey in later-than-1969 technology. The centrifuge to simulate Mars gravity for extensive periods of time and find out what provisions are needed. The latter was planned for the ISS, but was also scrapped by Bush, which means his newfound Mars initiative is going to have to reinvent the wheel at some point in order for him and his apologists not to have to cave on his self-delusion of infallibility.
To service both of these during development, you need something like a shuttle. Period. And a real one, not the experimental model we’ve been flying for a quarter century. Unfortunately, the gutless wonders in the government want us to keep putting Bondo on the old one instead of funding this initiative for real.
And why should we do this at all? Because if we don’t, someone else will, and to them belongs the future.
And astronauts died before the space shuttle. However, in the “space race” days, these were considered acceptable losses. NASA doesn’t have to beat the commies to the moon and such nowadays.
Well, I recall that the purpose of the Shuttle, as pointed out in the OP, was to be a boring, cost-effective, safe, and reliable means of getting people and payloads into LOE and back again (obviously for the people, and sometimes orbiting instruments in need of repair). The Shuttle fell rather horribly short of all its targets. People figured out after we were committed that it was cheaper to just launch a whole new satellite than take one out of orbit and fix it. Two flights cost more than what was projected to be its annual operating budget, and it was supposed to fly roughly five times more frequently than the program could handle at its peak. It was supposed to have a failure rate in the 1 per thousands, not one per 50. By any sane standard, what was delivered vs. what was promised makes the Shuttle a complete boondoggle.
Now, it’s true the Shuttle was massively oversold in the design phase, and “mission creep” perhaps doomed what could have been a better program to the failure it became. But the Shuttle was pitched to the politicians and the public as the trusty space truck that would make space flight routine and pave the way toward a permanent, practical human presence in space. That dream clearly never materialised, and I suppose it was a completely unrealistic one to begin with. We learned a lesson as a nation, but it was an enormously costly one, both in terms of funds and human life, and besides the HST, I can’t think of many things the Shuttle has done that couldn’t have been done cheaper and safer with unmanned disposable rockets. Many, many people through every design phase were trying to tell us the Shuttle Program was madness, and they were shouted down. “Can do” attitude and all that.
I think NASA needs to be thoroughly revamped and reprioritized. Even with some spectacular failures, our robotic exploration craft have delivered so much excellent new data, folks from just about every scientific discipline will need years just to interpret it all. That makes them very happy, and should make us proud as a nation. Look at the Mars rovers: They’re over a year past their specified minimum life span, and have been given an 18th month extension. How many of us were glued to the web when Huygens landed on Titan (I know that’s ESA’s baby, but it would be on the ground without Cassini)? If anything, the scientific value of that mission exceeded the hype. How many Shuttle launches can you say that about? And how justifiable is such a program when its annual budget (about $3 billion, with a roughly $400 million pricetag for “return to flight” alone since the last accident) exceeds that of entire missions like the Mars Rovers, or Cassini-Huygens?
IMO, it never should have been built. It’s almost pointless to use it now, except as a stopgap. NASA has proven rather resoundingly over the past 30 years that it can’t do LOE in a safe and cost-effective manner. It’s also demonstrated some brilliant successes of late in unmanned planetary exploration. I think the future course for NASA ought to be pretty obvious: Stop uselessly launching humans to trundle around overhead for a king’s ransom apiece, and stick to real science.
The Shuttle was intended simply as a means to support construction of a, or several, low-earth-orbit space stations, and to be replaced in fairly short order by something better. It’s done that fairly well despite the mission creep and oversale issues mentioned. The failures are organizational ones, derived from vague and inconsistent goals for the space program, causing erratic funding profiles.
So, is the US building anything to replace the SS? Even if nothing bad happens the fleet is down to what? Three?
The plan now is to complete the ISS, fulfilling commitments to the partner nations, using 28 more Shuttle missions, then rely on Soyuzes to crew the thing until it can be abandoned. No Shuttle missions are assigned to any other purpose. The fleet is down to 3, yes - Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour.
You got it exactly. NASA is a buying agency, they should say what they want (performance requirements or needs). They should say how they want it delivered, and what data they want. Then they should get the hell out of the way. I worl for the government, on NASA projects. Many many of our problems can be traced right back to NASA. They change requirements. They diddle with how other agancies and companies do daily routine things. They make decisions that overrule what they said previously. They make decisions that are counter to what I, or the company recommend. They demand thigns that are not on contract, while ignoring things that are. They give orders where they have no authority to do so. They direct other government people to do things, and then deny giving the orders, if something happens. They like to pretend they are real engineers. They will sacrifice anything and everything in order to meet an unrealistic schedule, even depending on technologies that may not exist yet. They will crucify any lowe level guy, for things he could not control, but they themselves have no accountabiltiy - incompetence is often rewarded by promotion.
Space Shuttle would have been much better of, if either the Navy or the Air Force had been in charge.