Minor Damage Found On Space Shuttle 233
The BBC is reporting on minor damage to the space shuttle Atlantis revealed by a 10-hour inspection in orbit. On the shuttle's right side, near where the wing joins the body, inspection revealed a 21" (53cm) line of chips in the tiles that make up the vehicle's heat shield. "...more analysis by engineers would determine whether a 'focused inspection' was needed in that specific area. If so, astronauts would use sensors to determine the exact depth of the damage to the heat shield tiles. NASA has placed the space shuttle Endeavour on stand-by to rescue the crew of Atlantis if they are endangered." The crew couldn't shelter on the ISS in case of trouble, because their orbit is higher and on a different inclination.
doh. (Score:2)
Re:doh. (Score:5, Informative)
Roger that.
FWIW, you can get a lot of mission info while it happens, even if you don't have satellite TV - http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html [nasa.gov]
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This is going to hurt its blue book value though.
--
Feeling slow today? [pair.com]
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I know it was a joke, but it would work.
They'd have to bring the orbital velocity down from the 17,000+mph to 0.
The reason for the high heat is the extreme orbital velocity required to keep them up. If they reduced it to 0, when they dropped back into the atmosphere, the atmosphere itself would act like a cushion, and as they fell into the atmosphere, their own terminal velocity would slow them down gracefully.
Search around for Joseph Kittinger (jump from 102,
Re:I have the fail-safe solution to these problems (Score:4, Insightful)
"I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit. They have oms thrusters, good for changing altitude on a mission and maintaining their orbit, but not dropping so much speed."
WTF?????
Geosynchronous orbit is about 36000 kilometers, while Shuttle's orbit is about 300 kilomterers, AFAIR.
In any case, going UP won't help you a bit (you'll still be in an inertial orbit). You need to _reduce_ your speed essentially to zero.
That means you have to expend _the_ _same_ _amount_ of fuel that was required to lift the Shuttle in the first place.
And that's completely impossible with chemical fuels.
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I don't know that there's enough fuel on the shuttle to bring it down to a geosynchronous orbit. They have oms thrusters, good for changing altitude on a mission and maintaining their orbit, but not dropping so much speed.
Low Earth Orbit velocity is approximately 7.8 km/s. The Hubble's orbit is slightly higher, with a slower velocity of 7.5 km/s.
The delta-v capability of a space shuttle after successfully completing a launch is approximately 600 mph (0.27 km/s), depending on the weight of the payload it's carrying. Dumping all their non-essential items out the airlock before the burn might gain them something, but not nearly enough. Remember that it takes two extra rockets and a full bolt-on fuel tank to achieve that 7.8 km/
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No, I really meant down into a geosynchronous orbit. :)
At a low orbit with 0 ground speed, the orbit will decay fast, which is what you'd want. If it went up to where it could maintain that orbit, well, it wouldn't come down very easily.
Basically, do a burn similar to their deorbit burn. Spin it around backwards, fire the main engines for about 4 minutes, flip back around, and fly home. :)
When they do the deorbit burn, they slow down by about 150
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More as in geosynchronous - traveling synchronous with the geo (ground/earth). It would just fail to maintain it's orbit, but that's the idea. :)
0 forward velocity means less friction against the air. Zinging anything across the atmosphere really quickly will ... well ... make a lot of friction, and as it flies through the thinner parts of the atmosphere, it will get hot and not slow very well.
Not a concern - More info here (Score:5, Informative)
More info here: http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090512fd2/index5.html [spaceflightnow.com]
"And Scooter, also I've got some good news about the tile damage that we saw on the starboard chine area earlier today," astronaut Alan Poindexter radioed from mission control shortly after 8 p.m.
"Oh, I'm looking forward to that. Go ahead," replied shuttle commander Scott "Scooter" Altman.
"It turns out that a focussed inspection of that area on the starboard chine is not going to be required," Poindexter reported.
"All right, you've got some happy EVA campers on that," Altman said.
Re:Not a concern - More info here (Score:5, Funny)
"Yeah, don't worry about the inspection, you don't have to go out, really.", Poindexter continued, "and, uh, whatever you guys do, don't look out the window."
"Copy tha--er what??" replied Commander Altman.
"Right, just... focus on the mission. Oh hey, Altam, your wife is here, she'd like to say goodb--uh, hello."
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fingers crossed. :/
Wings crossed. I think that they finally found their bat.
So what happens.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Then, they get home and buy Powerball tickets, because those kinds of odds are nearly as good as winning. The Shuttle has more or less always sustained some tile damage during launch; its heat shield is replaced after every launch as it wasn't designed to be perfect (well, it originally closer to perfect when it was to be built of solid titanium, but plans change...) The damage turned out to be a significant player in Columbia's loss, as it happened that the part of the shield that was damaged was extremely critical to the proper functioning of that area.
OTOH, here we see an almost pristine heat shield. The damage is long, but it's very narrow, likely caused by a single piece of falling debris striking in multiple locations. This isn't going to prevent them from coming home in Atlantis.
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Informative)
buy Powerball tickets, because those kinds of odds are nearly as good as winning
I wish that were true, but NASA's estimate on heat shield damage is 1 in 221. Two in a row are unlikely, but not unimaginable.
Remember the 10 day turnaround? (Score:3, Informative)
its heat shield is replaced after every launch as it wasn't designed to be perfect
The replacing the tiles after every launch was actually not part of the original program. Originally the Shuttle was supposed to have a 10 day turnaround time. Like, it lands, they clean it up a bit, and send it off to orbit, almost like an aircraft. You know, it is a -spaceplane-. I still have the Rockwell literature from when I was a kid on it.
Anyway, I think the first cracked or damaged tiles showed up on the first flight
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Actually, I remember the advertising and planning on it. I also remember all the nifty artists concept drawings showing multiple shuttles in orbit, servicing various space stations, ferrying passengers to and from places, etc, etc. It was either said or implied that there would be multiple shuttles both ready to launch and docked at space stations all the time, so a pickup mission for a defective unit wasn't that inconceivable.
I believe it was after the first manned shuttle m
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"because no telescopes with sufficient resolving power were tasked with imaging it"
Too bad they couldn't be in an orbit of a Space telescope I bet that could get a good picture of it....
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So they should have used a microscope vs. a telescope then.
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Funny)
.. if they launch Endeavour to rescue Atlantis, and Endeavour suffers damage at launch?
Then they bring out the gimp.
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Funny)
Can they use the clone tool to erase the damage?
-dZ.
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Funny)
". if they launch Endeavour to rescue Atlantis, and Endeavour suffers damage at launch?"
Then you are obviously in a Michael Bay movie, where logic and physics are thrown out the door. Mayhem, shakycam and explosions usually follow.
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But that's okay, because all of the NASA engineers will be replaced by supermodels. But they'll be wearing glasses so that you'll know they're very smart.
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Easy they do what they would have had to do in the past when they didn't have another shuttle ready -
Call the Russians and get them to send up a rescue Soyuz - they might only be able to save a few but that's better than none ....
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We just call the Azgards for help.
Re:So what happens.... (Score:5, Funny)
Right, we don't want to have excessive chances for success.
Getting to ISS (Score:4, Interesting)
Can someone speculate the feasibility of "dropping" to meet ISS?
I mean, does NASA have equipments/knowledge/training to do such maneuver?
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:5, Informative)
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Can someone speculate the feasibility of "dropping" to meet ISS?
I believe that it's a question of available fuel.
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:5, Informative)
So what makes you such an expert?
Nasa experts have looked into all of these issues and potential solutions.
A mere couple of hundred miles is not a problem (you do know how fast the shuttle flies don't you?) Orbital mechanics is the problem. The fuel required for the shuttle to change orbits would weigh too much for it to get off the ground in the first place.
The risks have been very carefully considered, with the mission ruled out of safety grounds for a long time. Yes, they are pushing the risks on this mission but having a back up shuttle on the pad ready to lift off in three days (you do know about this don't you?) mitigates some of the risks. That together with other changes they have made have kept the risks of a catastrophic failure below the limit set for every mission.
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:4, Funny)
Erm.. Have you even heard about Newtons laws? If you do, could you quickly explain them to me so I can estimate your knowledge of physics? After that, I can explain further, but right now I'm a bit baffled.
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:5, Informative)
Thanks for that, Mr $0.02, that made me smile :-)
Daveime, no I'm not an expert but I do understand the laws of physics and have read up on this. Some of what you say is correct, but a lot isn't.
A small amount of fuel could be used to get the shuttle to visit the ISS. Unfortunately, this would be in a very elliptical orbit so they would only be able to (very) briefly wave through the window as they flew past each other at a very large differential speed before ploughing into the Earth in an unfortunately bright fireball.
To get to the same altitude as the ISS (keeping the orbit circular) requires dropping by 210km and speeding up by 200m/s. Not in itself a great requirement on fuel. The problem is that the orbit inclinations are so different (HST is 28.5 degrees, ISS is 51.6 degrees). To make this change requires something like a 3000m/s speed change sideways (this calc is only order of magnitude accurate). This requires a lot of fuel.
As others have stated, the current design of the shuttle has some major faults. Not being on the top of the rocket being one of them. This is not news and has been known for a long time and yes it has been taken into account in the next design (which isn't a shuttle at all).
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The shuttle is an inherently flawed design, this isn't news. The crew-carrying module of any rocket should always be on the TOP, where it isn't going to be hit by debris. Also this configuration allows for a launch escape system, which every manned rocket ever made except the shuttle has. (All they have are parachutes which can only be used in level gliding flight, i.e. t
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The shuttle actually has several ascent abort scenarios [wikipedia.org]
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:4, Informative)
But it's not that NASA scientists "haven't thought about it". It's about beancounters deciding that their table of risk factors doesn't warrant the extra cost, and leaving no margin for error.
No. If you work out the fuel required to move the shuttle from a docking position at Hubble to a docking position at ISS, it requires an amount of fuel that is almost equal to the weight of the entire shuttle itself. It is physically impossible and has nothing to do with the bean counters.
But hell, why let common sense get in the way of ad hominem attacks ... this is /. after all.
Or why let science get in the way of a good conspiracy theory?
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:4, Interesting)
Don't know much about orbital mechanics, do you?
Changing Apollo 13's course from what it was originally to a free-return course requires the merest nudge compared with the fuel required to change orbital planes like what would be required here.
Also, consider that the LEM had enough fuel in its descent engine to slow its descent and keep from smashing into the moon and an ascent engine to get it back up (though I don't know if the ascent engine fuel is usable by the descent engine).
Re:Getting to ISS (Score:5, Interesting)
The descent engine and ascent engine were entirely separate, since the entire descent stage of the LM was discarded on the moon for return. There were no interconnections between the two. That does not mean they couldn't have burned the DPS to exhaustion, staged, and then burned the APS for as long as required.
In any event, the shuttle cannot carry enough fuel to make the orbit change required in this instance simply because the tanks aren't big enough. You can't put 500 gallons of gas in a tank that only holds 300. This is not a simple matter of flying in a line from point A to point B. Go download Orbiter and educate yourself.
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Go download Orbiter and educate yourself.
When it runs on Ubuntu I will.
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Re:Getting to ISS (Score:4, Informative)
Not quite right.
The ISS is below hubble so to get to it you need to drop in height. As there is no friction in space, this change takes just as much fuel to lose potential energy as it does to gain it so it doesn't make much difference. The shuttle would also have to increase in speed a bit (from 7500m/s to 7700m/s) so energy would be required for this too. However, these two requirements are insignificant compared to the change in orbit inclination required. HSS is 28.5 degrees, ISS is 51.6 degrees. That will take a lot of fuel.
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Which also raises the question: why is this being done by the shuttle? Couldn't this repair be done robotically, therefore allowing a much smaller, less complicated and more expendable craft?
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Its worth reading up on just what sort of work is involved in these Hubble servicing missions. Heck, on the first one, Story Musgrave [wikipedia.org] probably had to have nerves of steel. The Hubble was not really designed for on-orbit servicing, and the kind of tasks they had to do were things that would be hard enough on a workbench, let alone in a spacesuit. By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
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By the time you built a robotic vehicle that could do all the things a trained shuttle crew can, you might as well just build a new Hubble.
Which begs the question, why aren't we building a new Hubble? My understanding is that the JWST [wikipedia.org] won't have capabilities in the visual spectrum. We can spend hundreds of billions on a war and entitlements but can't find money for NASA while we fall further and further behind (soon to lose manned spaceflight capability altogether) our competitors in space? WTF is wrong with this picture?
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Essentially, the development of adaptive optics and better control algorithms has allowed ground-based telescopes to catch up on Hubble. Plus, they have larger mirrors for more light-gathering ability, all at substantially less cost.
What ground-based scopes can't do is analyze spectra that don't penetrate the atmosphere very well. Infrared and UV light, for example, are hard or impossible to read from the ground. Space-based telescopes are more useful there.
Hubble development was started when we were sti
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Couldn't this repair be done robotically
I don't know the difficulty of whats being replaced on this mission, but it does include several modules that were never intended to be serviced in space. These servicing missions are carried out by mechanical superstars. For an interesting read on how difficult it is find some of the interviews with Story Musgrave.
Humans are unmatched in their ability to do the work required. You could build a new hubble and launch it easier than you could built a robot to perform t
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It's the same reason the American shuttle has a crew and the Russian shuttle didn't. Americans take a lot of pride in sending people into space. There's fame, glory, and feeding the PR machine. NASA has to keep the taxpayers satisfied that the missions are worth something. Sending up robotic missions don't have the same awe value. This was decided years ago.
Russia on the other hand, didn't have to satisfy the taxpayers. They did their mission to compete with the Americans.
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It's been a while since I've done any physics, but I'm fairly confident that your orbital height is determined by your orbital speed. If we think of an orbit as a circle parameterized by (R*cos t, R*sin t), then the velocity is (-R*sin t, R*cos t) which has length (i.e. speed) sqrt(2)*R. So if the height R gets smaller, then so does the speed; or vice versa.
There's no extra fuel used to change speeds after you've changed orbital heights: you change height by changing your speed. This is why geosychronous or
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"dropping" means reducing velocity, which requires fuel. Remember, there's no (or next to no) drag up there at 350 miles altitude.
Also compounding the problem is that the ISS is in another orbit, so they would have to manuever to get into that orbit, again requiring fuel.
All in all, "dropping" and matching the orbit of the ISS is out of the question on account of them having too little fuel to do it.
Orbital mechanics, my friend - it's not like driving on the highway :)
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"dropping" means reducing velocity, which requires fuel.
Actually, "dropping" (210km in this case) means increasing velocity (by 200m/s). Not obvious but true.
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Equipment, knowledge, and training? Yes, they have that. What they DON'T have is sufficient fuel. That's a real show stopper for that option :-)
What would happen to Atlantis? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What would happen to Atlantis? (Score:5, Informative)
I read some article that said it was the latter -- putting it into a suicide path into the ocean.
See this AP article [google.com]:
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..... and it would really suck afterwards to see it survive re-entry.
Watching it proceed on a textbook glidepath, gear down, descending into the water.....
But seriously, you could leave it up there. It's in a pretty high orbit.... the hubble telescope's been there for plenty of years now with only a small station-keeping rocket. Send up a nice inflatable pod that fits into the cargo bay like Bigelow aerospace's designs, tack on a couple of solar panels and ta-da! Another space station.
I know, it's not reall
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What kind of spaceship is that?
Speculation (Score:4, Interesting)
As far as I know the pilot is only needed to manually deploy landing gear. Everything else can be automatic or remotely operated.
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That would make for an exciting scene in a movie, but this guy points out at article:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1231115&cid=27935049 [slashdot.org]
that implies it is quite a bit easier than that (the initiation can probably be done remotely, or on a timer).
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Buran might have very similar layout, but that's like with current commercial airliners - they too look virtually the same (can you distinguish easily every Boeing from Airbus in the sky?).
It just so happens that there aren't many sensible aerodynamic arrangements, especially given very precise (if pointless, in the case of both shuttles) requirements and extreme flight conditions. And if, while contructing you shuttle, you see that the other team has settled on one layout which seems best also to you - why
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Alas, the more likely answer is that the shuttle breaks up badly enough to crash hard, but not enough to free the capsule in time for a safe landing. You can't deploy a parachute at mach speeds!
If it was worth it (but it isn't), the better option would be to refit for a fully remote/automated landing.
Since it's not worth it (considering that the shuttle program is end of life), they'd just fire up the OMS engines remotely to put it on course for a burnup and crash in the ocean.
Why can't you land it by remote/autopilot? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
The problem is that I am not sure that the shuttles have autolanding capability. The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via gro
Re:Why can't you land it by remote/autopilot? (Score:5, Informative)
I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
Won't work. The landing spots are generally near the takeoff spots. The takeoff spots were located so if it blows up on takeoff, the parts rain down on the dolphins and whales. Unfortunately (?) when it comes in to land, it arrives from the opposite direction, and no one selected landing sites that are empty to the west. Unfortunately gets a ? mark because back in the 70s when the shuttle was going to do everything for everyone, everywhere, it was occasionally claimed it would be able to land on commercial runways... so if you're coming in a bit short, just land at colorado international airport. That, along with most of the vehicles abilities, was all cut during development to save money.
The astronauts may have lobbied to keep NASA from giving the shuttles the ability to land themselves (or via ground control) in an attempt to keep pilots from being made irrelevant. (Throwback to test-pilot days I guess).
Based on the faulty assumption that all pilots do is keep it straight and level and wait as patiently as the plane lands. The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks. They know their vehicle like a kernel hacker knows his kernel.
So, say the exhaust temperature of one APU is fluctuating. If the computer could "do something" to fix it, it would. The humans job is to invent new ideas of troubleshooting and fixing. Flip that switch see what happens, try this maneuver. The stuff the Apollo 13 guys did is not amazing or unlikely or lucky, despite what the general public thinks, it is in fact exactly what they were supposed to do...
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
Thats why you have humans onsite, in the loop.
Re:Why can't you land it by remote/autopilot? (Score:4, Informative)
Think of that Canadian pilot whom invented a way to put a jetliner in a slip to lose altitude to land at an abandoned military field when the plane ran out of gas because of metric/imperial issues.
I take that as an reference to Gimli Glider [wikipedia.org], a story that anybody interested about aviation should read. Another good example of having a human in the loop was 2003 shootdown [wikipedia.org] in Baghdad.
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The GP could also be referring to Air Transat Flight 236 [wikipedia.org], which ran out of fuel in-flight above the Atlantic Ocean while heading from Toronto to Lisbon. Due to a lucky minor course correction prior to running out of fuel and some excellent piloting, the plane landed safely on the island of Terceira with no injuries (the plane is apparently still in service). There was a pretty good dramatization done for TV (link [youtube.com]).
Human error (Score:2)
But it's also important to note that this happened because it was the pilot who miscalculated the fuel to begin with. His flying licence was suspended as a result.
Another example of a pilot who ran out of fuel due to his own error was Varig flight 254 [wikipedia.org] in 1989, when the pilot made a decimal point mistake and entere
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The whole point of decades of training for airline pilots and astronauts is for them to fully understand each little bit of the A/C and how to work when it breaks.
You really show your ignorance here. Everyone knows it is really cold in space. It is much more important for the astronauts know how to fix the HEATER, not the A/C, if it breaks.
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Discovery was capable of automatic landing back in 2006 when they were still treading a fine line after Columbia. It appears it was a nasty hack at the time and would be manually plugged in if needed so it may not be included on current flights, but it was available.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/06/30/0458246 [slashdot.org]
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Last I heard, the shuttles had full autolanding capability, with one exception. There is no computer control for lowering the landing gear - the controls for that are fully and only manual. That dates back to way-back-when days, when they didn't fully trust the computers. There are no provisions inside the shuttle whatsoever for raising the landing gear, that can only be one at the processing facilities on the ground. Therefore they wanted no chance whatsoever that the landing gear could be accidentally
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Yes, the Shuttle does have autolanding capability [space.com]. This was added after the loss of Columbia to cover exactly the scenario you postulate.
In the even of an autolanding, the primary recovery site is White Sand NM, with Edwards AFB as backup. They'll use a landing trajectory that minimizes the number of people underneath the landing path.
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I think the best solution would be if Atlantis could be brought back by autopilot. If the damage is marginal (that is they THINK it might destroy the shuttle but are not sure) then bringing it back unmanned would give you the possibility (if the damage is survivable) of recouping your billion dollar plus investment.
The problem is safety protocol. If they think that the shuttle is damaged, they will command it to deorbit in such a way that it burns up on reentry and lands in the pacific, instead of risking a crash on the US mainland. Such a trajectory makes it impossible to land.
Think of it this way. If they choose an re-entry path so that can land on the Pacific side if it survives reentry, then they've also chosen a path so that it will crash onto land if it doesn't survive. The two goals are incompatible, so the
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That dang Astronaughts Union. Always with their fingers in politics! Congress listens to them since so many of their constituents are Asstronaughts
Why don't they just put an auto pilot on it, then some remote control robots in the cargo bay to do repairs to the Hubble? Any experiments they do up there could be done by robots too, or otherwise automated - I mean telesurgury has been performed, what else do they want? Robots can do it. This is LEO, not Mars. Drones work fine by remote control, there's
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It cannot auto-land but that's not because of lobbying by astronauts. There was no point to developing that very expensive feature. Keep in mind that the shuttle was designed in the early '70s. It's also worth keeping in mind that while a few commercial jetliners CAN autoland, they are absolutely not trusted to do so without a pilot present to oversee and take over if required. Just imagine if it does it wrong and plows through a major metro area at mach 12!
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> But what would happen to Atlantis in that case? You obviously can't tow it or land it by remote
Why can they not land on remote ?
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Why can they not land on remote ?
Because the whole point of the exercise is to land something that might disintegrate.
Disintegrated parts always land short.
When the last one blew up, the parts luckily did not land in downtown Houston. Next time they may not be so lucky.
Why not pick a site where it won't fly over anyone? Well, if you fire the OMS retros on the opposite side of the planet from the landing site, and draw a line from there to the landing site at this orbital inclination, it probably passes over something sensitive. There's
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I'm surprised at that. Buran was able to fly to orbit and return entirely automatically in 1988. The American shuttles were not capable of the same at the time, but in the intervening twenty years they've not been upgraded to have that ability?
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This was a deliberate design decision, not a case of 'we don't know how'.
Since STS-121 in 2006 [slashdot.org], there is now a remote cable to allow ground control of the normally
Re:Remote Pilot (Score:2)
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I'm 99% positive that they don't even need the 2 man crew to do it. But, I'm sure they would. How many seats are there on the Endeavor, and how many folks are up in the Atlantis? Gotta have somewhere to tie everyone down. I wouldn't want to make a re-entry standing in the back holding on tight. :)
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What I wonder... (Score:5, Interesting)
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Extra careful checks... The Columbia disaster was due to comparatively huge damages to the shuttle, and this time they even report "scratches". There's no reason to worry about this, and NASA won't even inspect it more closely.
In comparison, the foam that struck Columbia was the size of a briefcase of 1.2 pounds (0.54 kg) and hit the wing at 800 feet per second (240 m/s), causing a 6-10 inch (15-25 cm) diameter hole in a critical section allowing hot gases to enter the wing.
This scratch is in addition to th
Re:What I wonder... (Score:5, Informative)
The latter. The photos and laser scans made of the chips have been made with an inspection boom which is now carried on the shuttle to make these inspections post Columbia.
Normally (again post Columbia) the shuttle does a back flip when arriving at the ISS so that dinks can be photographed by the ISS. On this trip, this obviously isn't possible.
Oh and past shuttle flights have had far far worse damage than this which is minor.
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The shuttle is very fragile compared to the Apollo spacecraft. I would call it a poor design as far as safety goes.
In general, ice forms on the fuel tanks as they sit waiting for launch. On launch, the entire thing shakes and the ice falls off. On Apollo, the spacecraft was at the top so nothing could fall onto it. The shuttle has all the "sensitive" parts in the middle, so there is plenty that can fall on it.
This sort of damage has always happened. NASA has just become very concerned over it lately an
This begs the question (Score:5, Funny)
"Have Rockets Run Their Course?"
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Rockets are fine, but the reentry vehicle must be above the rocket, because (a) the rocket i
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No. But they have flown their trajectory.
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It's being covered by many US based media. You're denser than a neutron star!
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It's been on the front page of CNN.com since the afternoon. Here's [cnn.com] the story.
Searching "shuttle" on msnbc.com and foxnews.com shows that both of them are carrying the story too, though neither site has it "above the fold" right now.
Re:Where's the U.S. news media? (Score:4, Insightful)
Haven't seen any stories on the U.S. news websites.
Then why all the bitching that /. is too US-centric? Or is "News for nerds" not a news website?
By the way, opening yahoo news it was right on top:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090513/ts_alt_afp/usspaceastronomyhubble;_ylt=Aj3NU3nOc4iB6txwGUCXG3wPLBIF [yahoo.com]
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The reason a rescue mission is on standby is there are "higher amounts of space debris in Hubble's orbit".
I doubt it. Afaict the shuttle on standby plan was being developed long before the "higher ammount of space debris" issue came up.
NASA is paranoid about a repeat of columbia. As such they have put in place an inspection routine for all shuttle missions and a plan for what to do if the inspection finds damage too big to safely land with.
For most missions they just plan to stay on the ISS until evacuatio
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Re:Rescue Logic (Score:5, Insightful)
http://spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts125/090508sts400/ [spaceflightnow.com]
"When we made the decision, the odds were 1-in-473 that we would have a problem on the shuttle for which a rescue shuttle was the solution," Griffin said. "Now, there are a lot of problems you can have on the shuttle, right? There are a lot of ways you can die on the shuttle, which is what gives you the overall shuttle PRA (probabilistic risk assessment) of about 1-in-75 or so. So you're roughly five-and-a-half, six times likelier to die on the shuttle for some reason that the backup shuttle can't save you from than you are to die from one the backup shuttle can save you from. ... From a statistical point of view, it makes no real sense to have a backup shuttle.
"However, here's the flip side. ... Those numbers cannot be explained to politicians or the general public. And should we have a failure with those 1-in-473 or whatever odds it was, should we have a failure that the rescue shuttle could have saved you from and we had not done it, the consequence to NASA would have been incalculable. We would appear to have been cavalier with human life, we would appear to have not taken every possible precaution, we would appear to have been coldly calculating the odds and rolling the dice with people's lives. And the appearance of behaving that way, in my judgment, was unacceptable. I could not risk that for NASA."
While the overall risk of impact damage is about three times higher for a Hubble mission than a flight to the International Space Station, it is not as bad as flight planners initially feared.
"We know we're accepting a little higher risk for this flight," Steve Stich, manager of the orbiter project office at the Johnson Space Center, said in an interview. "That's why we've tracked it very carefully."
Even factoring in debris from a satellite collision in February between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium telephone relay station, the mean odds of a catastrophic impact during the Hubble mission are on the order of 1-in-229, which is well below the 1-in-200 threshold that requires an executive-level decision by NASA's leadership.
A preliminary analysis put the odds at 1-in-185, but the numbers improved after recent radar observations and consideration of the shuttle's orientation in space during the Hubble mission. The planned orientation, or attitude timeline, reduces the crew's exposure to impacts that could damage critical areas of the ship's heat shield, the coolant loops in the shuttle's cargo bay door radiators and cockpit windows.
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This is interesting background, but I'd say the statistical calculation is either not fully stated, or incorrect.
He says that, of the scenarios where there could be loss-of-life on the shuttle, about 1/7 of the time a rescue mission could be used to prevent that loss of life. Interesting, but two things: First, a 1/7 reduction in the death rate for an activity sounds significant to me. Second, this really says nothing about the statistical sense of having a shuttle on standby.
The real question is, what i
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You'd be better off asking the Russians for rocketry help, they're the experts these days.
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While you're at it, get some tips from the Amish - they seem to have transportation nailed down.
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Huh. You're comparing the well-renowned Russian rocketry competence with the technology-adverse Amish?
What a strange world you must live in...
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If you mean Concord, that was Anglo/French.
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