I missed it, does anybody know a link where the NASA TV broadcast of the launch is archived? Thanks 
Tuckerfan’s link to the BBC news website has a link to the top right that may be of the launch. I’m in work so I can’t open too many windows to check 
There are some videos of it along hte right side of this page:
http://www.nasa.gov/returntoflight/main/index.html?skipIntro=1
Thanks!
Haven’t checked any links, but I remember hearing that tiles are routinely lost during missions. I think some tiles might not be critical. Still, it would be nice if they had a ‘repair kit’.
The problem with a repair kit is that, as I understand it, the tiles are specifically shaped for their positions. I wonder if they could develop ‘heat-shield duct tape’? (Only partially facetious.)
Tiles regularly fall off of the Shuttle during launch. This is nothing new and (correctly or no) has been determined to be part of the normal operating condition, despite not being a design condition. The critical areas are the leading edges of the wings and the nose of the lifting body where flow stagnation occurs resulting in high tempertures from ram heating.
If it is, for some reason, determined that Discovery isn’t safe for re-entry and the repair components and processes created after Columbia’s demise can’t fix the issue, the Shuttle astronauts would have to take shelter in the ISS until Atlantis could be launched. Discovery would probably have to be abondoned, the Shuttle program deactiviated, and quite possibly the ISS removed from service. Given the state of the whole Shuttle/ISS quagmire, that might not be a bad thing. But methinks that Discovery will, barring some unforeseen issue, will return safely and the whole program left to lurch along par normal.
Stranger
NASA TV had some really great segments on tile repair. They have insulation in baggies that fill the voids and a carbon plate and gasket that cover the entire area, secured with auger screws.
How many Shuttle docks are there on the ISS? It seems to me that Discovery could be docked there until repairs could be made. Actually, having a repair facility in space would be a good thing for the space programme because it would further the ‘working-in-space’ ideal in addition to providing a larger margin of safety.
The forward landing gear door, where the chipped tile is, is considered one of the more dangerous areas to have a problem (although not nearly as critical as the wing leading edge.) But the chip looks small, and it might just be a piece of coating that came loose. I can’t tell from the images how big the chip is, but fairly large chips (>1 inch) have occurred in that area on past missions with no ill effects.
The large piece of debris that came loose just after SRB sep is weird. It looks large, and regular in shape. It looks like one of the shaped pieces of insulation they bond on separately from the sprayed-on stuff. They’re saying that this large piece didn’t hit anything, which is goddamned lucky based on its size.
When NASA studied the situation broke the problem into two pieces, “expected” debris, typically small, that occurs even if the insulation is installed completely in accordance with the design. There is a large database of this debris from past flights, and it was studied in exhaustive statistical detail. The conclusion was that the risk due to “expected” debris was acceptable (I can’t give a single number because several scenarios and confidence levels were considered). The tile chip is an example of this.
They also considered “unexpected” debris, which is typically large and happens because the insulation wasn’t put on correctly. Now, you can never manufacture something exactly the way the blueprints say to, so there is always a risk of something big going wrong. The database of “unexpected” debris is smaller and it is much more difficult to assess the risk. I don’t have any insight into how NASA handled this. The big piece that came loose at SRB separation would be considered “unexpected” debris. As I said, based on its appearance, it is a damn good thing it didn’t hit anything. They should be able to determine exactly what it was based on the imagery.
I’m pretty certain that there is only one docking port that can accomodate a Space Shuttle. There are two additional ports that can accept a Progress supply ship or a Soyuz capsule, but the Shuttle can’t occupy either of them (or vice versa) and both are typically occupied (one by an operational Progress and the other by the Soyuz emergency return vehicle). Discovery has a tile repair kit on board now, and from the description of the damage it sounds as if it could be repaired if necessary, but significant damage, as occured with Columbia, could not be repaired in space. Even if a spare wing panel could be delivered to the Shuttle there isn’t any way that a spacesuited astronaut could install it.
A “repair facility” would indeed be a good idea for a much larger, more functional, and more expandible station. For the ISS and the Shuttle, however, it would just be another boondoggle with little effectiveness or utility. There is neither space in the existing modules to store repair equipment or supplies, nor is their manpower to devote to repair work; for the standard 3 man crew, it takes roughly 200 hours/week just to maintain the ISS, leaving little enough time for carrying out actual experimental work. A dedicated repair facility, which would not see use except in contingency, would just add to the workload for the existing crew and in view of the massive cutbacks and reductions to the original platform schedule (and the ISS is a much scaled down version of the original Freedom Station) just an expense is unlikely to an extreme.
The ISS has become a major white elephant; we can’t get rid of it for political reasons (and it’s not clear how we would go about dismantling it), but it has been so delayed, reduced, and contorted that it no longer even holds out minimal promise of providing any use as a scientific or industrial platform. It’s not even marginally self-sustaining; with the cancellation of the Propulsion Module it can’t even maintain its own orbit and requires regular Shuttle flights to nudge it back in position. Even arguments for it as an assembly point or weigh-station for a potential Mars mission are nonsensical; every major study done for a potential mission to Mars shows that the “Mars Direct” option is vastly more cost-effective than assembly in orbit. (Ditto for manned Moon missions, though it is still unclear at this point what a Moon mission would offer us.)
Essentially, the ISS has become a way for justifying the Shuttle…and the Shuttle, a necessity for the ISS. And you thought Catch-22 went nowhere? :smack:
Stranger
I think this is the first time I’ve asked for a cite because I agree with someone. 
That’s some catch, that Catch 22.
Everything I’ve seen indicates that if the shuttle suffers serious damage on launch and cannot return safely to Earth, they’ll jettison it, and hole up in the ISS until another shuttle can be launched.
IIRC, at the end of the ISS’s life, they’ll simply chuck it into the ocean, as was done with Mir.
Here’s a cite that is based on Zubin’s The Case For Mars. His initial estimate was $20B, which in today’s terms is somewhere around $35B. Even allowing for additional project inflation–say, three times the cost–it comes in vastly cheaper than the infamous NASA “90 Day Study” which concluded that it would take $450B, which they later scaled back to a more modest ~$290B. :eek: Obviously, Congress didn’t want to commit to those costs, especially since we’d already clearly won both the Space Race and the Cold War. Freedom Station (or Station Freedom, depending on who you talk to) became something of a placeholder for future exploration without actually being designed for any specific mission or purpose, and then was “cancelled” and reborn as the ISS, which ended up being more of a way to bolster the faltering Russian economy (unlike every other member of the ISS consortium, Russia was paid for their participation) and a political touchstone.
Here and here are a couple of other references for Mars Direct. There is little in the way of completely unbiased analysis; everything I’ve seen either bends toward NASA and the major aerospace contractors, who insist that 12-figure budgets, orbital assembly, et cetera are minimal for a successful mission, and the Mars enthusiasts, who come up with figures that are, frankly, probably lowball and represent an extremely stripped down one-shot mission.
Personally, I think we’d be better off ignorning the Moon and Mars, instead shooting for exploiting the resources of the near-earth asteroids; once you’ve established an industrial/commercial beachhead in space and can make space travel a paying proposition there won’t be much discussion about the “waste” of the space program. But not only would that require a fundamental restructuring of NASA (a virtual impossibility at this point) but it would also demand a kind of financial and technological dedication that would make the Manhattan Project or the Apollo program look like child’s play. It would be a decades-long effort involving hundreds of thousands of scientists and engineers, and I don’t see the political will to make that happen, nor the venture capital and cohesiveness for that to occur with private industry alone.
Stranger
It’s not that simple; the ISS is considerably larger than Mir was, and substantial portions of it are likely to survive re-entry; also, the extent of the station is such that it is likely to come down irregularly. Mir’s re-entry was actually botched and came down several hundred miles short of the predicted impact because flight planners decided at the 11th hour to fire the deorbit motor continuously, fearing that Mir might skip and overshoot into South America.
The ISS would probably need to be at least partially disassembled before deorbiting. Also, lacking a propulsion module, some way would need to be contrived to safely deorbit it. And regardless it would be a huge political and PR mess for both NASA and the Russian Space Agency, especially considering how NASA pressured the RSA to destroy Mir rather than overhaul it or sell it to private interests as not to compete with the ISS.
How can he see he’s got flies in his eyes if he’s got flies in his eyes?
Stranger
It’s the best there is.
<nitpick>
It rolls back over to seperate from the external tank (I just found that out last evening, watching the NASA-TV feed recapping the launch) prior to the “Plus-X” (?) procedure.
I’m going with the dynamic loading answer posted by AndrewL .
</nitpick>
I’m thrilled that they are back in space, I love my dish network system, with NASA-TV, and I’m overjoyed that I got to watch the rebroadcast with my nieces, who were just as thrilled to watch it launch (aged 5 & 3).
-Butler
“Plus-x” refers to a maneuver that uses the plus-x thrusters. My guess, based on looking at the definition of the coordinate system and orbital dynamics, is that the plus-x thrusters are the Orbital Maneuvering System (OMS) thrusters pointing backwards. In other words, firing them makes the shuttle move faster. This would cause the shuttle to lift away from the tank.
The infamous “90 Day Study” was also very badly reported on. The $450B number was for a 30 year period of operations. Mind you, coming up with a number for 30 years of operations and trying to give that to Congress is just being stupid, but it’s not nearly as unreasonable when you break it down. That’s $15B per year. Given that the study included missions to the Moon, Mars, and setting up a space infrastructure, it’s a lot more than just the straight mission to Mars that Mars Direct is.
See the 7th paragraph down, here:
I disagree: I think that as a first step we should establish a moon base on the dark side of the moon (but not too far round), based around huge telescopes. The telescopes are then shielded from light and other e-m radiation from Earth and will be able to give us vastly better pictures.