Colombia shuttle

[Uraniun235]

I thought there was a big list of stuff invented directly or indirectly due to the space program.

[Sea Skimmer]

OK, frightening thought just popped in my mind. I know it would never work, but what if we harnessed 2 Atlas Vs together like the Solid Rocket Boosters of the Shuttle launch system? My mind just boggled.

It'd be better simply to steal the Energiya/Buran design from the Russians. Or, revive the old DynaSoar concept with a craft you can stick on top of an Atlas V and designed with a bay large enough to hold collapsable manipulator arms for orbital repair missions, space station construction, and a docking module.

The Russian space shuttle project is long dead; I doubt you can get it operational anymore. DynaSoar was an interesting concept, yes. Pity that it was killed in the 1960s (the USAF was most unhappy about that)

There is now a restaurant inside of its cargo bay. And since its basically the same tech level as the shuttle, I doubt it would be worth the money even if it had been kept in good condition.

[Enlightenment]

dont you think you are being a tad pessimistic?

No. I've spent a lot of time thinking about and researching potential catalyist factors which could prompt the colonization of space. Of all the potential factors that have been argued over the years the most plausible factor I have yet seen is alien intervention. That should say quite a bit right there.

Reality works on economics. Things aren't done unless they make financial sense: unless they can turn enough profit to make some rich asshole even richer. Human spaceflight does not, will not, and cannot make a profit at current launch prices. The investments necessary to reduce launch prices to the point that human spaceflight would have even the remotist chance of being profitable are not profitiable given the current launch market. This is a closed-circle problem that has been in place for at least forty years and will very likely never be broken before western civilization falls or humanity wipes itself out, period.

[Shaka[Zulu]]

Reality works on economics. Things aren't done unless they make financial sense: unless they can turn enough profit to make some rich asshole even richer. Human spaceflight does not, will not, and cannot make a profit at current launch prices. The investments necessary to reduce launch prices to the point that human spaceflight would have even the remotist chance of being profitable are not profitiable given the current launch market. This is a closed-circle problem that has been in place for at least forty years and will very likely never be broken before western civilization falls or humanity wipes itself out, period.

got to agree with you on the point about the rich asshole... I guess what we really need are a few junkyard scrounging basement/garage lurking uber-geniuses to develop an engine that can do the job for the right price, without getting raped by the establishment first. Tall order that, but it could happen... come to think of it, there are some on these boards who could possibly be up to such a challenge (Lord Wong... you listening? )

[Bug-Eyed Earl]

I'm not trying to start shit by asking this, as this is a genuine question I want your opinion of.

Am I a bad person for not giving a shit?

[Sonnenburg]

It's all kind of amazing when you realize how something we take so for granted in sci-fi is so amazingly complex and dangerous. I mean, ship goes into space, bata-boom bata-bing, that's the end of it. Even if there is a problem it'll just crash, not burn up or explode (unless it's a bad guy, of course).

[Enlightenment]

I guess what we really need are a few junkyard scrounging basement/garage lurking uber-geniuses to develop an engine that can do the job for the right price, without getting raped by the establishment first.

Many, many people have already tried this. The financial, and in some cases physical, wreckage of their efforts is a matter of record. Go look up Roton on Google for one of many, many examples of people who thought that they could reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude or two. Many people are still making similar attempts but there's utterly no reason to think that they'll succeed where so many before have failed.

Spaceflight is very expensive and the kind of investments necessary to change that are extremely high risk won't pay off for a century or more. No one in their right mind invests money at kind of venture when traditional securities--even in this market--are far safer.

[The Duchess of Zeon]

No. I've spent a lot of time thinking about and researching potential catalyist factors which could prompt the colonization of space. Of all the potential factors that have been argued over the years the most plausible factor I have yet seen is alien intervention. That should say quite a bit right there.

Reality works on economics. Things aren't done unless they make financial sense: unless they can turn enough profit to make some rich asshole even richer. Human spaceflight does not, will not, and cannot make a profit at current launch prices. The investments necessary to reduce launch prices to the point that human spaceflight would have even the remotist chance of being profitable are not profitiable given the current launch market. This is a closed-circle problem that has been in place for at least forty years and will very likely never be broken before western civilization falls or humanity wipes itself out, period.

The future of spaceflight is almost inevitably in the militarization of space.

[Shaka[Zulu]]

The Shuttle (and the ISS) were never supposed to get so complicated. They got that way thru the kind of compromising that only comes from politicians that want to play engineer (and change the whole raison d'etre of the entire project after every election cycle). In the end, the shuttle design that we use today was chosen simply because it was the cheapest to develop (or to put it another way, the most expensive to operate) yet stiil was able to be the jack-of-all-trades yet master on none the politicians wanted.

dont even get me started on how they screwed the pooch on ISS!

[Enlightenment]

It's all kind of amazing when you realize how something we take so for granted in sci-fi is so amazingly complex and dangerous.

Spaceflight is not so amazingly complex and dangerous. It's just that the Shuttle is a thirty year old deathtrap. If over the past thirty years there had been any serious efforts to move away from the idea of space missions as one-shot experiments and towards a more industrial-commercial model for spaceflight we would have a launch vehicle that didn't blow up as frequently as the E-D.

It's not all that much of an overstatement to say that, in terms of reliability, the Shuttle is about as close to the E-D as one can get. They're not transport vehicles; they're both flying bombs that require major modifications on a per-task basis.

[Shaka[Zulu]]

I guess what we really need are a few junkyard scrounging basement/garage lurking uber-geniuses to develop an engine that can do the job for the right price, without getting raped by the establishment first.

Many, many people have already tried this. The financial, and in some cases physical, wreckage of their efforts is a matter of record. Go look up Roton on Google for one of many, many examples of people who thought that they could reduce launch costs by an order of magnitude or two. Many people are still making similar attempts but there's utterly no reason to think that they'll succeed where so many before have failed.

Spaceflight is very expensive and the kind of investments necessary to change that are extremely high risk won't pay off for a century or more. No one in their right mind invests money at kind of venture when traditional securities--even in this market--are far safer.

Oh I know all about the various fates of so many would-be's... I'm still ticked at Beal Aerospace for going so far as making the most powerful engine since the Apollo F1 work, then going under and not even making the design public domain... what a waste!!!

there are ways to start bringing the costs down though... things like standardization of spacecraft busses, integration of assembly-line practices etc... would you beleive that right now every expendable rocket built is for the most part a custom build???!!! that this practice includes those rockets that are supposedely of the exact same design (ie each and every Atlas V heavy that comes off the line is almost completely unique)?

More realistic design requirements would also go a long way... For example the shuttle itself is such a horrid mishmash of conflicting design requirements that it almost sickens me -- they needed 2 separate vehicles... the spacecraft equivalents of a chevy trailblazer SUV & a ford F150 pickup truck, and ended up getting a race car that thinks it's both a tractor trailer and a greyhound bus AT THE SAME TIME! how stupid is that????????

[Lord Poe]

I spent today talking to my fiancee's dad, who worked on Columbia when it was built. He was involved in making the tiles, then moved to environmental control, then payload. I enjoyed listening to his stories, and his take on today's events.

[Patrick Degan]

The future of spaceflight is almost inevitably in the militarization of space.

An exercise so pointless and easily counterable that it will not be seriously attempted.

[Enlightenment]

and his take on today's events.

If you don't mind, what was his take on the Columbia loss?

The semi-informed scuttlebutt in sci.space.* is that the thermal protection system failed on the left wing leading to overheating and eventual structural failure. A possible contributing factor raised by some participants would be the overheating and explosion of the left side landing gear tire, the force of which would aparantly be sufficient to tear the wing off the body of the orbiter.

Another possibility which has been raised given the fact that something was observed to break off the orbiter while it was over California is that the landing gear door might have fallen off.

[Raptor 597]

My best friend's uncle was at Toledoe Ben on the Texas/Louisiana border. They strangely found one the arms of the crew members. And the sonic boom woke up me, but I didn't go watch and just went back too bed.

[MKSheppard]

we would have a launch vehicle that didn't blow up as frequently as the E-D.

110+ Missions, 2 failures..... pretty good record if you ask me...

[Enlightenment]

110+ Missions, 2 failures..... pretty good record if you ask me...

It sounds great if you put it that way, but in terms of people flown and people killed there's IIRC a 1 in 9 chance of dying on any given Shuttle flight.

[MKSheppard]

The problem is, they kept trying to try out new tech with
the shuttle's Main Engines....IIRC, cryogenically cooled
hydrogen burning engines, as opposed to good old kerosene
in the F-1.....

Just one F-1 engine provided as much thrust as all
three Space Shuttle Main Engines!

[Patrick Degan]

110+ Missions, 2 failures..... pretty good record if you ask me...

It sounds great if you put it that way, but in terms of people flown and people killed there's IIRC a 1 in 9 chance of dying on any given Shuttle flight.

—and a slightly better than 95% chance of surviving on any given shuttle flight. Very good odds by any measure.

[Shaka[Zulu]]

The problem is, they kept trying to try out new tech with
the shuttle's Main Engines....IIRC, cryogenically cooled
hydrogen burning engines, as opposed to good old kerosene
in the F-1.....

Just one F-1 engine provided as much thrust as all
three Space Shuttle Main Engines!

and the F1 not only had as much thrust as but also 1) weighed less than those 3 SSMEs and 2) needed less tank mass to hold the propellants as well... a far preferable trade to having a roughly 80second increase in Isp performance. Maybe the Beal engine will get resurrected... it's in the same thrust class as the F1 and has the virtue of being a current design with the brain trust still available for a price. It's practically a no-brainer to mount it on a shuttle successor.

[Crayz9000]

You know what? To hell with all these concepts! Just bring back Project Orion, the trashcan propelled by nuclear cherry bombs! It's not really polluting, they just imagined it, and the ship can be build to withstand all the shocks of repeated detonations...








[Note: In case it's not obvious, I am kidding.]

[The Dark]

It sounds great if you put it that way, but in terms of people flown and people killed there's IIRC a 1 in 9 chance of dying on any given Shuttle flight.

—and a slightly better than 95% chance of surviving on any given shuttle flight. Very good odds by any measure.

98.2% chance of survival. And the only reason 1 in 9 have died is because many go on multiple flights. Only 14 shuttle astronauts have died. While that sounds like a lot, that many die on the local interstate each month. And I'm not sure the odds of survival are that much higher either.

Enlightenment: It was almost definitely something in the left wing. Tire pressure was increasing and there was a temperature rise in systems in the left wing, especially the hydraulic system. I would personally favor the tile damage theory, due to the debris that hit during launch.

[Admiral Piett]

Somone explain to Piett about the Apollo Applications program put together
by von Braun, that included colonies on the Moon....it got cancelled by
Richard Nixon

Of course they were cancelled.The USA got on the moon,that was the goal.
After the second trip people were already asking why the program was going on.
The same would happen with Mars with the Marina scheme.
I hope you do not seriously expect that expensive nuclear driven spacecrafts will be churned out like candies for some improbable colonization program.
A space station and an orbiter are required to mantain a permanent presence in space.

[Sea Skimmer]

Somone explain to Piett about the Apollo Applications program put together
by von Braun, that included colonies on the Moon....it got cancelled by
Richard Nixon

Of course they were cancelled.The USA got on the moon,that was the goal.
After the second trip people were already asking why the program was going on.
The same would happen with Mars with the Marina scheme.
I hope you do not seriously expect that expensive nuclear driven spacecrafts will be churned out like candies for some improbable colonization program.
A space station and an orbiter are required to mantain a permanent presence in space.

A space station is completely unnecessary and doesn't factor into any mars plans. Some method of personal to orbit transport is needed. But a huge expensive reusable shuttle is not.


Now if you just want to sit in space, then you do need a station or something. But that has no point. There's noting more where going to learn with people sitting in orbit we can't learn with unmanned platforms

[BenRG]

As much as I am loath to admit it, I think Enlightenment is right about the way the manned space program has gone. Since the time of the Apollo lunar landings, NASA's manned space program has degenerated into a mess of political compromises and minimum-cost botch jobs.

The moon landing program, for example, was cancelled just as NASA started getting some useful science done. Why? Because it was expensive and no one in a position of power saw the point now that the 'Commies' had stopped trying to land a man on the moon. The Skylab station was a throw-away propeganda exercise developed in response to the (debatable) successes the Soviets were enjoying with their 'Salut' space stations. Plans to keep Skylab in service beyond the end of the end of the Skylab 4 mission were ephermeral to say the least. No one saw beyond the bottom line, which is understandable, but regrettable. Because of that, US manned spaceflight has stagnated since the day the Apollo 17 LEM left the surface of the moon.

Similarly, the entire Apollo/Saturn system, which had a great deal of room for expansion and had an excellent safety record, was trashed for political reasons to make way for the space shuttle. McDonnel was so keen on the space shuttle that they ran all the copies of the Saturn V blueprints through the shredder so that NASA would have no choice but to buy the shuttle.

The Space Shuttle was redesigned and re-conceptualised so many times that it ended up in service about five years late, and billions of dollars over cost. Dozens of 'Shuttle Application' programmes were cancelled, leaving only an extremely-delayed space station. All the other programmes that the shuttle was meant to support were cancelled, making it a machine without a purpose. That was on top of being a poorly-designed deathtrap because of several cost-reduction design compromises.

I must, however, disagree with the assertion that manned space flight has no purpose. The Hubble Space Telescope is an example of an unmanned project that would never have been a success without a manned space program to back it up. The failure rate of unmanned probes is high, and human explorers are automatically more flexible and more able than any robot probe. Naturally, there are environmental conditions that limit any possibility of flights to the outer planets, but these could yet be dealt with by improvements in technology.

The expansion of humans off of Earth is not a 'quasi-religious quest'. It is an inevitable part of human growth. Eventually, a combination of overpopulation and resource depletion will make the exploitation of space a critical survival neccessity. Better to lay the foundations for this now. Even if you disagree with the issue of resource depletion, there is one critical issue to address: Right now, all our eggs are in one basket, and we are just waiting for something to come along and smash them. Ask the dinosaurs if you don't believe me. Oh, I forgot, you can't can you? And that is the point.

What is needed is for a true international space program, formed by the fiat merging of NASA, Rossyacosmos, the ESA and JASRO. This will have a clear programme goal and funds from all member states (managed by the UN, perhaps). It will be non-political and non-profit. Success of the new programme will be judged on its' results in terms of exploration and scientific discovery, not any myth of profitability (the myth that destroyed the Shuttle programme in the 1980's).