Monday, February 03, 2003

[Colin Glassey] A Short Comment on the Space Shuttle NASA has been claiming that they are very concerned about safety. That safety is their top proirity. That the shuttle won't fly again until the problem is solved. This is a load of horse manure. This is the truth: if all the tiles on the shuttle were to fall off during the lift-off, littering the ground with broken ceramic, there is NOTHING that NASA could do about it. That's it. The shuttle can't be repaired in space, we don't have back up systems that can reach the shuttle in time to save the crew, and if the shuttle isn't scheduled to rendevous with the space station, it can't get there on its own from any other orbit. The crew of this hypothetical shuttle would be faced with two alternatives: die from lack of oxygen in the shuttle, or die on re-entry as the shuttle burned up. If NASA has considered this scenario and come up with a solution for it, I would like to hear about it. As far as I know, there is no solution for this problem. On this last mission, NASA could have asked DoD to take high quality photos of the Shuttle to check for damage to the left wing. They didn't because, in my opinion, it wouldn't have made any difference. This is hardly what I would call a safe system. It could be better on several fronts: The shuttle should have a space-ready propultion system that allows it significant manvourablity after it reaches it initial orbit. It should be able to dock with the space station from any orbit. The space station should have some spare parts for the shuttle so that limited repairs can be made to the shuttle while docked with the station. If we are going to keep our current low-earth-orbit space station then the shuttle itself should be redesigned along several paths: cheaper to fly, more reliable, easier to repair especially in low-earth-orbit. Since we have spent 30 billion dollars on a space station and its up now with a crew, why can't we use it as a parts/repair stop for the shuttle itself? Why isn't every mission of the current fleet scheduled to orbit past the space station? To claim that safety is important to NASA today may be true in a narrow sense, but from a broad perspective, it would be laughable, if it weren't tragic. 11:39:53 AM     [Colin Glassey] The End of the Space Shuttle There are many people in the Space community who are not fans of the Space Shuttle. Within the Science Fiction community, the Space Shuttle has far more enemies than friends. The problems with the Shuttle are important: its too expensive, its too complex and risky to fly (we now have two fatal accidents in 113 launches for a failure rate of 1 disaster for every 60 successes), and it doesn't go high enough (it only makes it to low earth orbit, it can't get to the really usefull Geosynchronous orbit). Gregg Easterbrook has a good article in Time about the space shuttle. Why Easterbrook? Because back in 1980, Gregg Easterbrook wrote a detailed article in which he savaged the Space Shuttle program and he was right. See Gregg's original article here. Gregg's 2003 recomendations are sound: end the Shuttle program now. End the Space Station now. Work on developing a modern, state-of-the-art, safe, reliable, and cheap earth-to-orbit cargo rocket. Work on developing a new, less complex, human carrier. The truth is: after spending 30+ billion dollars on the Space Station, what do we have show for it? A lab for studying the effect of low-Earth-orbit micro-gravity on humans. Its not even that good a test bed for a travel by humans to Mars because it is too close to the Earth, it is protected by the Earth's magnetic field. Just think: for 25 billion dollars we could have a human expedition to Mars! Instead all we have is 3 fairly unsafe space shuttles and a space station that is too close to the Earth to do really useful space research. NASA has done some wonderful things over the last 30 years. But most of them have resulted from the work by the underfunded robot probe division. The space shuttle and the ISS (space station) have been given the majority of the funding and have under-performed in producing good science. The two big things the shuttle did was: 1) Launch and repair the Hubble space telescope, and 2) Launch the Chandra X-Ray telescope. The loss of the Columbia is sad, and a tragedy for everyone in NASA. It adds insult to injury that the space shuttle has been a poor use of U.S. tax dollars ever since the program began in 1970. Update: I'm re-reading Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 article and here is a direct quote from 23 years ago: The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to -400ƒ F. to make the gases flow as liquids. Ice will form on the tank. When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank. Now we know the following: 80 seconds after launch, long-range photos showed a chunk of what looks like the insulation fell off the main tank. Further images show this chunk colliding with the left wing of the Columbia and then disappearing. If this chunk of insulation was actually covered by ice (speculation here) then it is easy to imagine that causing damage to the left wing's tiles. And damage to the tiles of the left wing of the shuttle would explain the failure of so many sensors on that wing during re-entry and potentially, the failure of the wing along with the destruction of the shuttle. 12:09:27 AM

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