First of all I respect the new flight director of NASA. He has what? four PHD’s. I just don’t understand why it absolutely has to stop flying in 2010 when the heat tile problem seems to be solved.
I know the technology is from the 70’s but it still is working. And growing up during the cold war I don’t feel comfortable with the Russians having the only means to get us to the ISS until 2013 at the earliest.
I know this could head to GD but lets try it here first. I know there are plenty of members here who could maybe answer this question.
Well, the head of NASA is under orders from the current administration to complete end of life on Shuttle . This doesn’t seem like a big mystery. They’re winding down Shuttle in favor of Project Constellation. Whether this is a good idea or not is not the NASA flight director’s business.
Fair enough squeegee I know NASA is not some organization outside of the Federal government. As a space geek, I would like to know why? If it is simply just an arbitrary cut off date from the Bush administration then that is one more reason to hate him. I should have put this in GD…grrr.
A few years ago there were articles out talking about the age of the computer equipment. They were buying 8" floppy drives from what ever source they could to have working ones. The New York Times on May 12, 2002. Please note they are still using 8086 processors, which the article says they were removing from used medical equipment at that time.
That isn’t a major problem. Ground equipment has been upgraded/replaced as needed when it is too expensive or difficult to keep it running. As long as you can still get parts, there’s nothing wrong with using “obsolete” equipment. Many of the old systems actually are more reliable and perform better than their replacements. They were designed to do a specific job, in comparison to modern COTS (commercial off-the-shelf) equipment that has been adapted to do the same job.
If they stopped making light bulbs that fit the sockets in your house, is that a reason to bulldoze the house and build a completely new house? Of course not, first you’d look for “new old stock” bulbs that fit, then you start scavenging for used ones, and when that is no longer practical, you spend a bit more money and upgrade the electrical wiring in your house.
What NASA/Congress/Administration have done is decide they want a new house because the current one is too big and too expensive to maintain. But they don’t have money to keep using the current house and build a new one at the same time, so they’ll abandon the old house now and rent an apartment while they use their limited funds on building the new house.
Get real. The light bulb comparison is bullshit. I gave a very good reason for NASA to want to retire the old shuttles. The shuttles are old. You can argue with NASA over keeping the old design if you like, I don’t plan on taking the bait.
Do you really need to justify retiring a thirty-year-old design? Surely we can do better today, and not have to deal with proxmired contraption that was compromised to near uselessness.
Is the reason for a lack of overlap between ending the shuttle program and the beginning of the new one (2010 and 2013) just a cost one?
I know I’ve read various news reports on the ridiculous cost of a shuttle launch, and I’ve read enough arguments about their age, usefulness, risk assessments, etc to generally agree that the shuttle’s need to be replaced, but I find it odd that there is no planned overlap between space programs. I suppose cost is, really, the only reason for that to be the case. I guess I find it odd that NASA and the USA are willing to depend on outside help when the entire mentality of the country seems to be “we can do it ourselves!”
I admit I’ll be a little sad when the last shuttle flight has ended. But then again, it’s exciting to think that something new will take its place. The wiki looks like the last flight is planned to be done with Discovery - of the ones left, Discovery was the first one up. Nice little bookend to the whole thing, though.
It’s not so much cost as budget planning that mandates a hard cutoff of funding for Shuttle missions. The cost of operating the Space Transportation System (STS) Shuttle isn’t just the expense of preparing individual launches themselves but also roughly fixed cost of maintaining the overhead for launch facilities and trained personnel. Indeed, if the STS program was able to sustain more launches per year, the costs of this overhead would be amortized over more launches and individual launch costs would be more competitive with expendable launch vehicles. It is necessary to cut this off in order to start funding production-level development of the successor Constellation system and facilities to be used therefore.
In addition, one of the selling points for the Ares launch system family used for Constellation is that it uses Shuttle-derived hardware which allows for adaptation of existing launch and integration facilities, ostensibly saving money versus building up new facilities from scratch. (The reality that it almost always costs more to make significant modifications to a system than to just build purpose-built equipment from scratch rarely penetrates the fictional, PowerPoint-dominated world of conceptual proposals.) Naturally, this means that you have to take the existing STS facilities out of operation and allow time for modification and pathfinding for your new system. While you are doing this you don’t have any way to support STS launches. Hence, a cutoff date and launch capability gap.
As for the “heat tile problem seems to be solved” I have to disagree. There is now a broad acknowledgment of this previously known problem by NASA management, but the solution–such as it can be said to exist at all–is a hacktastical risk mitigation plan of questionable value that increases cost and maintenance requirements, decreases manpower available for actual mission-related activities, and would likely not have fixed the problem which resulted in the catastrophic re-entry failure of Columbia, to wit a puncture in the reinforced carbon-carbon leading edge thermal protection which allowed overheating and structural collapse of the wing structure. Should another puncture of similar size occur, the only credible response would be to launch a rescue mission which (hopefully) would not experience the same failure. Like the post-Challenger In-Flight Crew Escape System (ICES) bail-out abort option, it exists primarily for management to say, “We’ve done everything practically possible to reduce crew hazards,” without actually fixing the problem (which would require major redesign and refit with likely reduced mission and lift capability).
Nor is the TPS puncture problem by any means the only standing safety issue with the Shuttle, as has been demonstrated in the post-Columbia safety-aware era; we’ve seen problems with leaking fuel tanks, cracked fuel lines, faulty switches, et cetera all of which have resulted in costly launch delays. Of course, these issues are part and parcel of expendable launch vehicles as well, and despite two failures the STS actually has quite a good history of completely successful missions and returns compared contemporary LVs like Titan III/IV, Delta II/III/IV, Atlas II/III; in fact, I believe the only American heavy launch systems with a better launch success rate are the Atlas V (with only about a dozen launches since introduction) and Saturn family. But because of the cost and hazard to personnel of the Shuttle, and the fact that it endures risk not only on the way up but also on the return flight, the level of scrutiny is higher than for expendable vehicles, and failures are extremely expensive both in increased hazard mitigation efforts and political/public support for the space program overall. When Boeing tilts a Delta over, Lloyd’s ups the premiums for the next few launches and mission assurance organizations get more funding to identify problems before they become failures. But when the Shuttle comes apart like a cheap gold watch, everything stops, Congressional hearings are held, and 60,000+ workers hold their breath to see if their careers are canceled along with the STS program.
Letting the Russians take care of getting American astronauts up to the ISS and back down may seem kind of risky, but in fact there is actually little we need the ISS for other than a place to go to. As scaled back as it has become, it essentially exists for the purposed of being a way-station to nowhere, and if we had to stop sending people up there for a few years over a disagreement about the quality of Russian versus American vodka, the net effect would be to limit the career ambitions of a few members of the astronaut corps and support personnel. Compared to the cost of running two concurrent manned launch vehicle programs, there’s no question, especially given the hard limitations of NASA’s budget.
The compromises built into the STS have more than cost impacts; indeed, to justify building the Shuttle at all, artificial restrictions were placed upon the use of expendable heavy launch vehicles in order to essentially give business to the STS program, i.e. requiring the Air Force and NRO to use the Shuttle as the primary platform for orbital delivery of reconnaissance satellites, which in turn drove the payload size and cross-range requirements on the Shuttle which in turn forced the use of lower safety margins and sub-optimal design. That shell game finally came apart along with Challenger, and the Air Force washed their hands of NASA launch deliveries and Blue Shuttle, but the compromises still remained, built into the design. Dennis R. Jenkins’ Space Shuttle: The History of the National Space Transportation System The First 100 Missions goes into extensive detail on early Shuttle development and the politics behind it for those who are really interested.
As for doing better today, the Constellation program is really a return to Apollo-era concepts (expendable two stage heavy launch vehicles with an additional Earth departure motor for transLunar injection, blunt-arsed conical capsule, separate lunar landing module, et cetera) updated to use modern avionics. This is essentially what we could have anticipated having in the 'Eighties and 'Nineties had we continued with the Apollo Plus and Apollo Applications programs. Far from doing better today, we’re just aspiring to do better than what could be done in the 'Seventies. It’s the smart, minimum risk and minimum development approach, but it can hardly be considered more advanced; and more disappointingly, this isn’t being viewed as an interim solution to a more mature and capable system, but the foundation for an entire class of human space launch vehicle operating for the next three or more decades.
Your claim was that the Shuttle is being retired because the equipment on the ground that supports the Shuttle program is old and difficult to find parts for. That by itself is no reason to scrap the entire program.
(You realize they aren’t putting scavenged 8086’s into the Shuttle’s onboard avionics, right?)
It could, but NASA would have to have the budget to have one as surplus for use as such. I do not expect that to happen, however. Nor do I believe that the shuttle is going to be retired in 2010 as planned (unless, of course, one of them blows up, in which case the fleet will be immediately grounded).
There’s apparently modules which have yet to be delivered that can’t be sent up there in time with the 2010 cut-off date, nor can they be shipped up using a Russian or European built booster due to things like design and weight constraints. Which means that those modules will either be allowed to rot away here on the Earth, or NASA will extend the life of the shuttles and cross their fingers that they’ll be able to keep launching the shuttles for a while past 2010 and nobody will die.
Of course, with the way NASA’s budget is doled out, much of it’s future is in question. We have a hugely expensive war to pay for, an economy that’s in the crapper and an election coming up (not to mention something could go wrong with one of the shuttles between now and 2010).
NASA’s already planning to pare back the budget for robotic missions to Mars. This means the odds of us sending a manned mission to Mars by 2020 are as near as nothing as to make no odds. Perhaps if the Chinese start putting their footie prints on the Moon, we’ll have a serious manned program with the goal of pushing towards new horizons, but I’m not holding my breath.
ok, Tuckerfan’s link really pisses me off. NASA is budgeted about 16 billion a year. We spend that much in a month in Iraq. Jeez, this is coming from a former staunch Republican (me)
I predict a landslide victory for the Democrats in November because I can’t tolerate this any longer.
Moderators? I know this is GQ. But I feel like ranting on this subject some more. I should have started this topic in GD.
Do you want to spend all of your money repairing and patching your 1990 Camry (which was a great car and very utilitarian) or buy a new 2010 car with all of the technical advances like traction control, accident prevention systems, GPS, satellite radio, side air bags, improved emission systems, etc., etc.
It’s like the Hubble telescope that NASA wants to retire. Yea, Hubble gave us a lot of neat pictures and people got upset when they heard that it might get shut off. It didn’t occur to the general public that NASA wanted spend their limited budget to replace it with something that was far superior.
Space exploration is suppose to be a cutting edge endeavor. Let the guys that know what the engineers that are designing the future can do, rather than trying to tell them to patch and repair their obsolete designs.
No, but at the same time, would you prefer to walk to work for the next 5 years or settle for the beat up Camry?
The BBC’S article is now saying 2015 vs 2013. I trust their estimate more. NASA almost always underestimates the time issue and costs.
So now we could be looking at 5 years of being dependent on the Russians to get us to the ISS. Wonderful.
Yes, the Russians can be untrustworthy, humorless bores but why not spend your money designing a system the will render their system obsolete rather than dumping your money (limited resources) on a system that is inherently obsolete.
Another bad analogy:
At some point it is better to take cabs and rent cars than to spend the money to maintain, license and garage your beater Camry. It may make more sense to save your money for a new, more reliable mode of transportation.
A bad analogy. You are junking your Corvette and buying a VW beetle.
It’s got wings. It lands like an airplane. It’s cool. We are going back towards the capsule that Chuck Yeager described as “sitting in monkey shit.”
A redesign where the shuttle sits above the tank and boosters would be a better idea for low Earth orbit.