More on Columbia 518
RodeoBoy writes "It seems that regardless of what NASA and Boeing wants the public to believe there are still questions about damage to the shuttle's left wing. Some Boeing engineers have raised concerns that proper analysis of the damage was not done at the time, due to changes and cutbacks in Boeing. It is also coming out that more than one chunk of foam might have hit and damaged the wing. With Boeing having some financial troubles and NASA under public scrutiny again, what is the future of the space shuttle program..."
The future? Just like the past should be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
I haven't been following this closely, but why would NASA want the public to believe in a non-foam-related cause, rather than a foam-related one?
I'd share your cynicism if they were saying, "It wasn't foam, it was Saddam!" But given a failure, why would the foam collision be worth burying in favor of something else?
I don't think it's in danger (Score:5, Insightful)
please NASA... (Score:5, Insightful)
"wants the public to believe" (Score:5, Insightful)
The media (and Joe Public) on the other hand, think science and space travel are just like Star Trek and that the problem is found and cured by successions of deus ex machina -- Plot Convenience Playhouse. So they pick up on Nasa's early interest in the foam theory, then think they're hiding something when Nasa says "It just doesn't seem to fit. We're not ruling it out, but we're following other leads for now."
The media (and Joe Public) want sensational instant-gratification science, of which this investigation will be anything but.
To the non-scientist, this whole careful, deliberate not-jumping-to-conclusions analysis is mind-numbingly boring. So they read their cultural biases into it and draw stupid conclusions.
You'd think that "nerds" who read Slashdot would know better than to make a sensationalistic statement like "wants the public to believe"... but then again look at some of the "from the
Sounds like 1986 all over again.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Also sounds like Ford and Firestone..
Don't close the space program yet (Score:3, Insightful)
Now that the macho space race against the Soviets is over maybe NASA should consider some size and cost-cutting.
Would anyone have a figure how much it would cost to send a space tourist to ISS on a Shuttle? I bet its a lot more than $10 million (allegedly the cost of sending them with a Russian mission).
Cutbacks (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that we'll get to the bottom of this eventually. Given enough time, of course.
However, I must wonder about how much of the shuttle funds were diverted to help fund the ISS...
In any event, the loss of Columbia and its crew should not be a terminating point for manned space exploration; we all have to escape from Earth in the end!
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
speculated that NASA is downplaying the debris strike to fend off criticism it might not have done enough to get the astronauts back safely.
There is no possible way NASA could fend off such criticism by just pretending mistake C happened instead of mistake G.
Unfortunently... (Score:3, Insightful)
Far as engineers saying something during the flight in emails. Well I could send out lots of emails saying it will blow up every time it goes up. Some day I would be right, but that wouldn't mean I warned them. If an engineer thought differant about the sitution it doesn't mean NASA ignored them and some is at fault. There were others who didn't agree with him. NASA has to make a call, and the might make the wrong one. This wasnt' preventable far as we know. Maybe it will come back to being some pre-flight thing that was done wrong of neglected, then it's differant, but if it's something that went wrong after launch it very well may be no ones fault. Things like challenger were differant. There engineers told officals before launch about the O-rings. Bulk of the engineers knew there was an extremely high chance it would fail on that day. When it blew they didn't even have to ask why it failed, they knew. They just had to investigate to show they were right. That was a preventable accident that was the fault of not listening to engineers.
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Check copy of e-mail communications after the foam incident [nasa.gov]
Re:The future? Just like the past should be... (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA is a monopolistic government agency which self evaluates, self polices and has little in the way of market pressures to deal with in order to continue to exist.
It makes a difference.
KFG
For the same reason they didn't want. . . (Score:4, Insightful)
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,77832,00.ht
KFG
This is what they do. (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineers think 'worse case scenario' all the time. I'm sure if you could read every email sent within NASA in a week you could find people arguing over 1000 design points, mission plans, etc. This is how it works. After the fact, a small subset becomes much more interesting, but that should be taken in context.
Which is not to say that we shouldn't be asking questions.
Re:Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, something like a random hit of space junk on re-etry would be something they'd have no way to avoid at all - just very bad luck.
It's not too hard to see why NASA would perfer it to be something like the second case.
Re:"wants the public to believe" (Score:1, Insightful)
NASA employs scientists. The administration however, is composed of non-scientific types - i.e. politicians and beancounters - just like everywhere else.
Here [nasa.gov] is their top dog.
The shuttle is obsolete. (Score:4, Insightful)
It's simple math and economics. Financially the shuttle program has been a terrible disaster. Now you can't second guess anything and there have been advances in comfort and living conditions in space and such thanks to the shuttle but I'm sure the same kind of things would have been done without it. We've learned things because of the shuttle, it hasn't stopped science, it's just not delivered what it was supposed to have.
I also fear that NASA itself may be out of date and obsolete. Am I the only one who is disgusted by the notion of the beaurocracy? There are all of these emails surfacing. I've worked at IBM and other big places and I get this sick feeling of CYA going on. I can just see the Dilbert-esque rocket scientist sitting at his desk composing the emails to the director about the foam falling off and the other possible causes. "Properly documenting" the risk. I've read Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster and that's one of the issues he pointed out. The administration lives in make believe where the engineers make compromises to do things on time. It's kind of a bummer because there are people that die because of it. I'd like to think that someone will be held accountable, I doubt that anybody other than an administrative warm body will be and at best they'll be fired and get a really high paying job at Boeing, TRW, or Raytheon.
I think it's high time we start looking at splitting NASA up in to 2 or 3 groups and making them compete with each other. Let the beaurocracy die and the science come back, make them write proposals, beg congress and private parties for funding and then hold them accountable for delivery. Let different groups take different approaches. Reward success with continued funding. NASA is cheap, relatively speaking. We can easily fund 3 NASAs. Right now it all rides on the success and failure of one entity with nearly an impossible mission, logisitally speaking. NASA can't even admit that the shuttle program is a failure because then they lose face and funding and there isn't another organization in place to do the science. So science continues to limp and NASA continues to put bandaids on a very expensive wound that has taken more lives than all other space related accidents put together.
And for the record I am appriciative and recognize the hard work and accomplishments of everyone associated with the shuttle program. They have engineered some amazing things and I'm not attacking anybody personally. It's the program as a whole that hasn't delivered what it promised.
Re:The future? Just like the past should be... (Score:5, Insightful)
Certainly up to this point what they have accomplished would have been simply impossible otherwise. It would be like asking some ancient Egyptians to get together and build a pyramid in their back yard.
However, even a cursory examination of the history of the whole shuttle project will reveal it to be a purely political affair.
Apollo and its forbears may have had politics as their genesis, but then, at least for a time, the politics dictated that the politicians get the hell out of the way and let the engineers get the job done.
That time has long since passed, whether public perception has caught up with the times or not.
KFG
That won't actually work... (Score:2, Insightful)
Did I mention they'd call it "Nasa?"
Re:The future? Just like the past should be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Development, however, has almost all been by the private sector to compete for contracts. In other words, they develop a product and then try to sell it.
Fokker, Sopwith, Boeing, General Dynamics, SAAB, all private firms that develop most of their products, even the military ones, quite independently.
KFG
AvWeek is reporting transition to turbulent flow (Score:5, Insightful)
Turbulent flow mixes the air near the surface much more, causing far greater transfer of heat to the Shuttle. There was some 'slumping' of tiles in that previous flight, temperatures reached ~2000 degrees, right at the limit of what the tiles can take.
This happens because Columbia's wing was far less smooth than the other (remaining) orbiters.
If there was significant roughness added by the foam/ice/whatever gouging the wing, that would increase the heating even more.
Another problem they were concerned with was an asymmetric transition to turbulent flow, which would cause the drag on one wing to be higher than the other, yawing the shuttle -- but it seems that there is more than enough control authority in the elevons and RCS system to counteract that if it happens.
thad
Re:Improve and go on until a third accident (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, despite the fact that fourteen lives have so far been lost in two shuttle accidents, it's still a whole lot safer than driving your car on a "lives lost per mile travelled" basis.
There's no way to change the fact that flying into space (even a low earth orbit) is always going to be an activity that carries a degree of risk.
If the astronauts are prepared to take that risk then I don't think some crazy belief that this should be 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe should get in the way.
Ultimately, the choice should belong to those who put their lives on the line. Has anyone (including the media) actually bothered to ask all those NASA astronauts still waiting in the wings whether they'd be prepared to fly the shuttle gain without modifications?
Imagine if we could only drive cars that were proven 100%, absolutely, perfectly, flawlessly safe... the roads would be empty and we'd all be walking from place to place. Even Segway's would be considered "too dangerous" to risk a single human life.
Come on folks, life is risky -- if it wasn't then where would the fun be?
Case in point [aardvark.co.nz]
Oh boy, here comes the conspiracy theory. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is the truth is almost never that simple when it comes to accidents involving complex and highly redundant systems. NASA is obviously having a hard time believing a 2 foot, 2 pound piece of foam could bring down such a technologically advanced piece of engineering (and yes, it was technologically advanced - much of Columbia's heat shielding, including the leading edges of the wings, was replaced with state of the art materials in 1999). I am having a hard time believing it too.
Anyone who has ever read a major aircraft disaster report from the NTSB knows that it is almost always a series of highly implausible events that conspire to cause disaster. Any one of these events would be remote; the chances of them coming together in the way they did would be almost impossible (but not completely impossible). This is the way it almost always is. We know that several shuttles - including Columbia - have been hit in their wings by launch debris in the past and suffered no ill effects. Why do we all suddenly want to believe that same debris brought the shuttle down this time? I don't believe it.
I do believe it could be part of the answer, though not the full answer. I believe it's possible (and I'm sure NASA's looking into this, among other things) that the foam hit was the first in a series of problems that compounded upon each other to eventually cause disaster. If it hit in exactly the correct (or incorrect) spot, where a fault already existed, then that's a different story. I know NASA's looking at the procedures used in the Columbia's last overhaul, for example (it's flown only once since then). In that case, the foam hit wouldn't be the cause of the accident - the faulty overhaul of the heat shielding would be. But NASA's looking at a lot of things, and I'm just speculating here, like all the rest of us.
The point is, NASA is an organization of scientists. They wouldn't know how to spin if they tried. They're looking at things analytically and none of their computer models are telling them that the foam by itself could bring the shuttle down. Who are you to argue with them? You'd think on this site, of all places, people would understand that scientists don't go rushing and jumping to conclusions - they examine all the possibilities and analyze everything very methodically. It has nothing to do with what they do or don't "want us to believe". I'm sure if they weren't so focused on their job at hand right now they'd be laughing at what so many of us apparently want to believe, whether or not there's actually any evidence to support our "theory".
Re:Building a new STS the right way. (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA doesn't need 20 or 30 shuttles, however, if we could get the European Space Agency (ESA), the Russians, the Japanese, Aussies, and even the Koreans to join up with the promise of owning their own shuttles, the cost could be easily be spread out.
Getting the Aussies to join up? Are you out of your mind??? There are 280 million people in USA. There is less than 20 million people in Australia. How on earth can we built even one shuttle? The cost will bankrupt the entire Australian nation.
Space Exploration...is dangerous! (Score:3, Insightful)
Whether foam caused the catastrophe or something else did, no power on earth was able to save these astronauts once they left the ground. They could not have dropped by the space station and waited for rescue, no docking bay was attached to the shuttle. I cannot see how obfuscation of the facts will help NASA, they want to know what happened so that it doesnt happen again. By downplaying the significance of the foam, which seems the obvious cause to us armchair space directors, they are allowing for all options to be given equal weight in the search for the truth.
Re:The future? Just like the past should be... (Score:4, Insightful)
Nasa is not hiding (Score:4, Insightful)
Soon after the accident, some people were correcting news casters that this would was not accident, but, like the Challenger, a failure of process. The media has been harking on certain reports that long ago reported the danger of certain tile damage. There are likely many reports on many of the shuttle systems that vulnerable under certain circumstances. Unlike many place, NASA does not hide it's head in the sand. It actively looks for problems and tries to solve them, if necessary. If the process works this makes the space travel safer. When the process does not work, as in Challenger, people die.
I have no doubt that whatever the cause of the accident, some report exists somewhere detailing the scenario. That does not necessarily mean NASA was negligent, just that NASA is thorough. Space travel is dangerous and as much as they might try, the process cannot be made so perfect as to catch and solve every problem. As many people have already said, you solve identify the problem, figure out the best way to solve it, and move on.
I would like to add one personal note. In my experience NASA is very focused on identifying problems, solving problems, and moving on. The step they don't do, and the step that many firms would do well to leave out the process, is the scape goating. It is as waste of time. In some companies in which I have work, fully half the time is spent figuring out how to blame other people for your fuck ups, and then participating in the ensuing punishment. It is inefficient and does nothing to create better products.
And one more thing. Under the the rules of the Clinton administration, all government agencies were required to do al they could to release documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act. Under the Bush administration, John Ashcroft has request the agencies do all they can NOT to release document requested under the FOIA. The implication of this is that the rapid release of document requested from NASA under the FOIA is totally voluntary. If they wanted to hide thing, Ashcroft has given them permission to do so.
What do you mean, "...Wants us to believe?" (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is, the foam is the most obvious candidate for causing the damage. But what if it wasn't? What if it was actually a fuel line that cracked open, began to burn -- hydrazine's value to the space program is that it can burn in a vacuum -- maybe it burned a hole from the inside out, allowing plasma from the rentry to get into the wing. What if it was actually a piece of space debris that struck the shuttle? We almost lost a crew a few years ago when a paint chip almost penetrated through one of the windows.
We just don't know, If they say it was the foam and it was actually something else, then the actual problem will not get fixed, and we will lose more astronauts.
The answers aren't going to come instantly. It is going to take a long time. It can take experts a couple of years to figure out what made an airplane come down, in spite of the fact that usually with a plane crash, the debris is in one small area. The shuttle debris is scattered over several states. The further west a piece is, the more likely it is going to shed light on what happened. The first pieces to come off are the most critical.
The astronauts are well aware that with each launch, they have a 50% to 70% chance of being killed. It's a testiment to how NASA does things that we haven't lost more astronauts. They accept this risk, because the work they do does eventually help everyone else in one way or another. They feel that this is worth the risk, to do what they can to help other people.
Will we stop going to space? Hell no! Even if the government gives up, people won't. How many people have died over the centuries when sailing ships explored the oceans? How many Polynesians sailed away from their home islands to colonize somewhere else, never to see dry land again? We have a pretty good idea how many Spanish galleons were lost in the Carribean. With a crew of upwards of 400, one ship resulted in a lot of lives lost.
None of that stopped us. Losing Challenger didn't stop us. Losing Columbia won't either. But it clearly serves as a terrible wakeup call that we missed something, and a sad reminder that spaceflight is not without risks.
So before you cry 'foul' and 'coverup,' give the people a chance to find out what happened to their friends.
Last -- what if they did know there was a problem? Do you think the crew would have wanted their friends and family knowing? Sitting there for the duration of the mission knowing their loved ones were doomed? I wouldn't want my family going through something like that. I'd rather put on a brave face, do everything I can to finish my work and life in some meaningful fashion, and then face destiny without making them suffer.
Sorry about the sermon...
Re:"wants the public to believe" (Score:2, Insightful)
Hahaha. What a perfect know-it-all slashdot response. How's your Jump to Conclusions mat working for you?
I've read 'em, I'm just not letting my cynicism and desire for the cause to be found ASAP to get in the way of the fact that the cause hasn't been found to be the foam thing yet.
If foam caused Columbia's loss, then the articles you've read so much more carefully than I will indeed be indicators of a problem. Your pedantic response will be right and I will be wrong.
But consider that whenever someone makes a complicated decision, a newspaperman goes out and finds someone smart to disagree with them, because it makes neat headlines and sells papers and web page impressions.
Space travel is risky! You design a rocket that's a compromise of thousands of different needs and restrictions. You get smart people together to design it, and beancounters to fund it, with the real vehicle being a compromise. Designers test whatever they can, and make educated assumptions about the rest. It's so complicated that sometimes those assumptions are found to be subtly wrong and people die.
In hindsight, those educated guesses look like negligence, but it's not necessarily so. It could just be a horrible, costly (in lives and $$) way to find out something new about the universe and how things interact. Remember, the area of the atmosphere in which Columbia broke up is not very well understood. Sometimes the unknown comes out and bites you and says, "HELLO! You never deduced my existance, but here I am!".
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
Aerospace is complicated stuff, and engineers will make mistakes and failure chains will occur. The question is whether the process that is in place causes the correct analysis to be attempted (even if the results are faulty) and there are a sufficient level of checks and balances in place.
In the Challenger accident, the process failed. In this case, there may have been bad analysis done by the individual engineers, or there may not have been enough information on the videotape to know (and taking drastic measures based on a guess is in itself dangerous). But as long as we operated on the best knowledge that we had at the time, I don't have a problem with what NASA did post launch.
On the other hand, Richard Feynman's paper on the Challenger accident is very appropriate here. Tiles have been getting damaged for a long time; they were not designed to take damage. Just because you survive a phenomena you don't understand once.. doesn't mean that it's a safe risk to take again. Engineers need to figure out why these things happen, and correct the design. Some steps were taken in the early 90's with the tile adhesive, but were probably not sufficient.
The tiles are a really good ablative shield (the best known, perhaps), but very delicate. And trying to use them on something that is going to experience launch energies is an inherently risky proposition. Managing that risk by adapting to newly observed behavior is the job of the engineering staff at United Space Alliance and NASA. Was it done sufficiently with the tile impact problems? I don't know.
Retarded logic (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Retarded logic (Score:2, Insightful)
NASA in my opinion is mishandling our money. This has been my opinion for almost 20 years. Two shuttle accidents just prove my point. Ignoring for the moment the lives lost: If this had been a normal rocket we had lost then we would not have lost so much money. The financial loss would have been close to what would have been spent anyway.
If the shuttle flights were occurring more often then it would have been comparable with loosing say an airliner. Annoying but within expectations. The number of flights would pay for a shuttle loss quicker, maybe enough to be factored into the costs. As it is we have lost a very expensive craft used for very rare missions. 5-6 launches a year is a sorry waste of my tax money for a system designed as if it was running 50 times a year. This is pork barrel spending at it worst hiding behind science and patriotism.
Re:What do you mean, "...Wants us to believe?" (Score:4, Insightful)
How do you figure your percentages? I am only aware of 13 Astronaut deaths, and one civilian death on the shuttle. So you are saying we have only sent up 26 Astronauts by your figures. Numbers are not for the mathematically challenged, use them with care for they have meaning.
Hopefully Science will Prevail (Score:2, Insightful)
It bothers me that the necessary fix for this problem might already be known, but that manufacturing entity can't speak up for fear of being sued into oblivion.
Oh, brother (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, if we just get rid of all their mechanical engineers, I'll bet they could build much more reliable shuttles!
Most notably the shuttle's turn around time and payload size. Both of which were cut way back from the original goals.
Yeah. Bastards. NASA is the only organization that doesn't meet initial estimates. Unlike, say, software companies.
No one else *builds* shuttles, you know? It's a little bit hard to *make* accurate estimates. If they simply underestimated everything, would *that* make you happy?
NASA in my opinion is mishandling our money. This has been my opinion for almost 20 years. Two shuttle accidents just prove my point.
You're cranky because of an accident a *decade*? Hell, Ford would *kill* for that kind of record, and they have a *much* easier task to do.
Ignoring for the moment the lives lost: If this had been a normal rocket we had lost then we would not have lost so much money.
The lives lost are essentially irrelevant. Maybe in a couple of hundred million years of shuttle flights, it'll measure up to some of the *other* things that we've done, like WWII or Vietnam. Why do you think they used only military personnel on the shuttle for years and years?
As for being a normal rocket and cost -- sure, it would have cost less. OTOH, the cost *per flight* would have been higher, because the vehicle wouldn't be reusable. There's a *reason* they built the shuttle, laddie buck.
If the shuttle flights were occurring more often then it would have been comparable with loosing say an airliner. Annoying but within expectations. The number of flights would pay for a shuttle loss quicker, maybe enough to be factored into the costs. As it is we have lost a very expensive craft used for very rare missions. 5-6 launches a year is a sorry waste of my tax money for a system designed as if it was running 50 times a year.
Had you been less ignorant about what you were talking about, you'd be aware that the reason shuttle flights were cut so far back from original design parameters is *because* NASA had their funding cut so much since the moon landings.
This is pork barrel spending at it worst hiding behind science and patriotism.
Yeah! We could *obviously* put the money into pursuits *far* more productive for the human race, like blowing up Iraqis! Are you stupid?
I don't remember that Soyuz 5 (Score:3, Insightful)
carried 25 tons of cargo with it into space.
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Insightful)
Currently, we have evidence of an impact near the wheel well tiles by a large object and a failure of containment near that point during entry. Despite the hopeful analysis by NASA: "It was all foam and it didn't hit any critical tiles, and even if it did, the Crater impact analysis program is wrong and the impact wasn't deeper than the tile and even if it did hit we got hit before and it landed safely so we'll be fine." I haven't seen any change from the same complacency and lack of rigor that influenced the decision to launch the Challenger all those years ago.
That doesn't mean that I think journalists are great at scientific enquiry. However, the heads of NASA don't seem to be terribly scientific either. Here's some choice quotes.
AndBased on WHAT? Whose jumping to conclusions now? It's called bullshitting until you get the results you want. For the record, here's my list of the mistakes I'm aware of in the analysis and conclusions surrounding the launch foam incident. Remember, this analysis was supposed to be the worst case scenario. And they concluded that there was "no substantial risk".
EnkiduEOT
perfect mission?????? (Score:1, Insightful)
The space agency administrator [Sean O'Keefe] says the Columbia mission "was looking like the perfect mission." He says there was "absolutely nothing on the screen" to hint of a problem, from launch right through to the final minutes before landing.
Shit falls off of your space ship during launch and that seems like a perfect mission? Seems like the only thing that defines perfect to this jerk was that the ship hadn't blown up previously. If only we all had such low standards for "perfect."
This is precisely the kind of management lying that feynman warned of in the challenger report [uky.edu]:
They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).
Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers. -Feynman
No one is personally to blame for this failure, but I blame anyone who would deny that this is a failure.
Where is the left wing? (Score:2, Insightful)
X-38? or maybe X-33? (Score:4, Insightful)
Government programs did not make the first aircraft, automobiles, locomotives, steamships (or sailing ships for that matter). Why should the first true spacecraft be any different? It does not take any more fuel to get a pound into orbit than it takes to fly a pound from the US to Australia. (yeah, airliners don't carry oxidizer - but bear with me).
The SSTO (X-whatever) that got funded and then killed was a damnable con job. It would be like Curtis Aviation promising to build a supersonic jumbo jet capable of flying 12,000 km at MACH 6 without refueling.
In 1908.
NASA does not "get" the idea of manned spaceflight. They "get" 20,000 jobs to keep some 20 year old experimental spacecraft flying at a cost of about 1 billion dollars per flight. Experimental spacecraft that were designed by political committes ten years earlier. Experimental spacecraft that the designers promised would be orders of magnitude cheaper to operate than the Saturn V (1970 cost to launch a Saturn was around 100 million). An experimental spacecraft that would be re-uasable. Well the solid fuel boosters cost more to recover and refurbish than paying for new ones each time. And the Orbiter itself has a tendency to be pretty well rebuilt between flights. (Maintenance and upgrades)
We still need the orbital equivalent of the Wright Flyer. Then data from that design can be used in developing newer, better designs. What is not needed is "the most complicated machine ever built" (NASA's favorite way of describing the Shuttle)
But don't fret about Mankind's destiny among the stars - there are other countries besides the US that have space programs. Once the US government realizes that lack of a real space program with cheap access to space means condemning the USA to a role in international affairs somewhat less prestigious than what France now enjoys, there will be a new Space Race - one that won't be looking to an organization whose greatest claim to fame now is that they once sent some powdered orange drink to the Moon. (Ok, I know that Tang never made it to the Moon, but hte makers of Tang claimed it did)
Re:Next Ticket (Score:2, Insightful)
That's not to say that I don't completely agree with your last statement. I'd be on one in a heartbeat. Period. No doubt. I'd roll that dice with no qualms. Space exploration is simply to important to our evolution and survival as a species.
The expected failure (Score:4, Insightful)
Contrast this with the solid rocket booster failure last time. That was an unexpected failure. Solid rocket boosters are proven, reliable components. The only reason they failed in 1986 is that the joints for assembling them into a stack were badly designed.
Privatizing NASA may not be the best move. (Score:3, Insightful)
It can, but it can also backfire. Examine the breakup of AT&T. Several good things came out of it: Better customer service, lower prices, more consumer freedom. But there were also losses. AT&T's entire research division is basically gone. Without it there would have been no C or UNIX.
The problem is that you have to make something profitable before a company will do anything, and generally it has to be profitable within the next three months. Remember, if you are running a company, you are answerable to the stockholders. If they loose money in a quarter, YOU get into trouble.
The problem is that a lot of cool things can't be done in three months, or eve three years. There has to be someone with deep pockets and less immeadate accountability to someone in order to try the financially risky stuff.
Major governments don't have the R&D money to get into space. Companies won't either, and if you privatize it, what you get is a space monopoly that can charge what it wants. It won't violate the antitrust act, because it won't have to. The massive money required to start anything will be sufficient barrier to entry.
What privatization often does is to set up businesses that don't innovate because they don't have the money to innovate. Everything has to go to beating out the other guy. Greater supply for less money is where all the creative energies go.
This will get us cheap sattelites, but very little in the way of scientific advancement or manned space travel, because it ISN'T profitable, and isn't forseen to be profitable in the near future.
Would hubble have gone up were NASA a private entity? Would it have even been built? There is no return on investment. Sure we've learned a lot of cool stuff, but it doesen't make people money tomorrow so it is of little value to a private company. Maybe it would have gone up, but then would the information recieved have been propritary? Only able to be looked at and used if you paid the price? Companies don't do anything out of the goodness of their hearts.
How many journals etc are starting to require fees for access? How many articles have there been about the conflicts between libraries and publishers?
If space travel enters the private sector, I fear that it will become something that doesn't benefit society as a whole, but only those with the money to pay.
No more pure science done in space. If there's immeadate profit you get something done, if there isn't it might get done if you pay them enough to do it.
Such is the problem with pure science. It takes years or even decades before practical results are found, yet most if not all of our technology was based on discoveries made far earlier than the practical application.
Re:Oh, brother (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, brother (Score:5, Insightful)
The Space Shuttle's complexity is a bug, not a feature.
Re:Say what? (Score:3, Insightful)
That the crew and orbiter were lost is sad. I'm sure if the engineers at NASA had a second go at it, they would have done something different, but they don't. They only had the one go at it, based on the data available, and their best guess. And sitting here playing armchair quarterback, after the fact, and before we really know the cause of the accident, is just silly. Blaming the engineers for failing to find a problem, which is only theroetical at this point, is simply horrible, and ignores the complexity of the situation. Personally, I think the best we can do right now is give the investigators the time to figure out what actually happened, and not get in their way.