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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
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The pace of missions since the beginning of the program is less than was originally anticipated, because of the delays after the Challenger loss, and much of the airframe on each of the vehicles has been through and passed detailed structural analysis and testing. NASA has been pretty thorough in inspections and replacements (i.e. the fuel line cracks)
Since these are virtually one of a kind vehicles, the cost of simply building an extra one is enormous, and NASA has been forced by a space-cheap Congress (when both parties have been in power) to compromise it's budget between planetary science, unmanned probes, manned flight operations, the ISS, and R&D for a shuttle replacement.
Nobody has come up with an adequate replacement/advancement in terms of cost and performance, but at the same time, nobody has wanted to kill of that R&D work (and other programs) to continue to build the same basic vehicle design with current avionics and materials.
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Jack_www
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I just hope that NASA can get more funding so that they can improve safety and build new shuttles.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Willem
Still, 20 years is a very long time for an aircraft which takes that kind of a beating. The stresses those shuttles experience on reentry must be enormous. Something was bound to break after flying that long! |
It's not the number of years, it's the number of flights - and they have structural pieces replaced from time to time if they show fatigue. Challenger's loss was not due to structural failure, and nothing so far indicated that was the problem with Columbia.
quote:
Wasn't one of the budget cutbacks awhile back an emergency ejection system? I guess the person who said it was to expensive is feeling a little foolish right about now. |
Well, expense is relative to usefulness. An ejection system for all seven crew members (the maximum load) would require an ejectable flight-deck module (a la the FB, EF and RF-111 series of aircraft) with completely different structural, instrument cabling, and electromechanical design, that may or may not be refittable in the existing fuselage. Anything less would only be usable in a much narrower variety of scenarios, and for less of the crew.
In any case, in the middle of a 1600 degree C pressurized gas plasma at 63 km altitude and 18,000 kph airspeed, there isn't an ejection system designable that could do anything for the crew. Even if you could design an ejection system that would work, and a compartment that could survive, the crew couldn't survive anything close to the G-forces involved in an ejection under those conditions.
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MichaeltheGreat
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Apolyton Grand Executioner
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mooning the house that Ruth built.
Oct 1999
time: 21:25
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quote:
Originally posted by Ned
The problem is, what could they have done to get the shuttle down safely with damage to the wing? Could they, for example, just parked it at the space station until a repair crew attempted repairs?
(This is beginning to sound like Star Trek.) |
No. Docking to the ISS takes a special docking hatch which takes up a good portion of the cargo bay, and which would have prevented a large number of the science experiments conducted on this mission.
When docked, the distance from the ISS to the ventral side of the vehicle would make and EVA impossible without extreme risk, and you'd have to know exactly what repairs to make - and many structural repairs would be impossible in any case, even if an EVA to the area of repair was possible.
I don't think it's particularly fair to make a comparison to the Challenger launch - in that case, there wasn't a consensus of opinion anyway, but the contrary advice was merely pointing out that NASA had never made an STS launch on days that cold (7 degrees fahrenheit colder than any previous launch). Making a launch decision (which could have been deferred) on the basis of conflicting advice, some of which was for delay, is not at all the same as making a decision to land a vehicle when there was no choice, and when all indications were that the vehicle was fine - it survived whatever impact it may have had with the piece of foam insulation, it flew flawlessly for 15 days.
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Willem
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Canada
Dec 2001
time: 00:25
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
It's not the number of years, it's the number of flights - and they have structural pieces replaced from time to time if they show fatigue. Challenger's loss was not due to structural failure, and nothing so far indicated that was the problem with Columbia.
Well, expense is relative to usefulness. An ejection system for all seven crew members (the maximum load) would require an ejectable flight-deck module (a la the FB, EF and RF-111 series of aircraft) with completely different structural, instrument cabling, and electromechanical design, that may or may not be refittable in the existing fuselage. Anything less would only be usable in a much narrower variety of scenarios, and for less of the crew.
In any case, in the middle of a 1600 degree C pressurized gas plasma at 63 km altitude and 18,000 kph airspeed, there isn't an ejection system designable that could do anything for the crew. Even if you could design an ejection system that would work, and a compartment that could survive, the crew couldn't survive anything close to the G-forces involved in an ejection under those conditions. |
Yes, I suppose I should wait until there's a few answers until I jump to conclusions.
Ah yes, I now know what I was thinking about. They scrapped plans to include an emergency escape capsule for the space station crew, not the shuttle.
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DanS
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Kickball Capital of the World
Jan 1970
time: 00:25
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Willie McCool was a friend of mine and neighbor years back before he got accepted by NASA for training. Flying in space is what he wanted to do more than anything, and he knew the risks. Knowing those risks, he wouldn't (and didn't) hesitate for a moment to pursue selection for astronaut training, and he worked his ass off and applied his great talents to do it.
He was funny, low-key but wound up at the same time, a great guy, not-so-great chess player, but super talented, smart as all hell, and he knew what he wanted in life and he went for it, and he made it. 
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The Mad Monk
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of Ice Cream
Mar 2000
time: 23:25
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quote:
Originally posted by MichaeltheGreat
Re: Bravery. On reentry, you get rock and rolled in far stronger turbulence than the worst anyone's every felt on any airliner, and you for a good period of time, you do it in the middle of a bubble of sorts, of superheated gasses that are 2-3000 degrees.
There are a lot of possible scenarios and conditions which can occur to the spacecraft, from which there is simply no possibility of recovery. You try to avoid those by engineering, but know nothing is ever 100% certain. The problems you can recover from, you train your ass off.
Willie McCool was a friend of mine and neighbor years back before he got accepted by NASA for training. Flying in space is what he wanted to do more than anything, and he knew the risks. Knowing those risks, he wouldn't (and didn't) hesitate for a moment to pursue selection for astronaut training, and he worked his ass off and applied his great talents to do it.
He was funny, low-key but wound up at the same time, a great guy, not-so-great chess player, but super talented, smart as all hell, and he knew what he wanted in life and he went for it, and he made it.
Ned - no surprise, the guy briefing the press is may not likely be privy to NASA requests to intel agencies operating classified equipment. NASA and the shuttle program run a lot of military missions with classified payloads, so there's pretty definite partitioning between classified and non-classified activity and personnel. I wouldn't be surprised at all by any apparent discrepancy like that. |
I am so sorry. 
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Zylka
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quote:
Originally posted by Dissident
I need to vent more here. I am angry. I'm angry because people say I can't feel bad.
I don't like people telling me how to feel.
This is also more about lives. I feel for the lives and family. But more is at stake here. This is a symbol. Not the lives- they aren't the symbol. But the space shuttle. Sure it isn't the best design out there. But the space shuttle represents the best the U.S. (and the world now we have astronauts and engineers from other countries) has to offer. It shows what is possible if the best and the brightest get together. And not even the best and brightest. It also represents americans from the president/congress on down to the talented fighter pilot, down to the blue collar guy in steel toe boots assembling shuttle parts.
In essence this shuttle represents the entire country. Even I feel a part of it. My tax dollars go to paying for this thing. We as voters support the space program. We give our contribution not by science or piloting skills, but our money. So our contribution to the space program is also lost. |
Good on you for speaking honestly. Of course it was a tragedy in the loss of human life, but the big thing that died today was an American icon. The sad conversation of this event centres around "what happened to the shuttle/ could it have been prevented/ are they looking into new shuttle designs?"
For the most part, it has nothing to do with the astronauts themseleves - "did they have children/ what were their lives like/ were their deaths repayed with the worth of their missions?"
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Lancer
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Oregon Coast, USA! or Bohol, Philippines!
Apr 1999
time: 05:25
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Zylka, ask this instead...did they go knowing they might not come back? They were willing to lay down their lives for the mission. These people knew it might come to that. Also, Americans have a way of rebuilding stuff we like, and care about, but building better. This space shuttle was a very big, expensive, and special piece of hardware. We will have a bigger, more expensive and better piece of hardware to be proud of. This day has seen to that, and so has the lives of the heroic spacefarers.
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02-02-2003 10:47
and I'm sure since it is their necks they're putting on the line, they're well aware of it. 
I´d just like to extend my condolences to the bereaved families. It just goes to show that space exploration is far from safe. Also the underfunding of NASA doesn´t excactly help. 
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