NASA Postpones Shuttle Launch

Mictian writes "NASA has decided to postpone Discovery's upcoming Return to Flight (STS-114) by a week to May 22. This is done in order to give the agency more time to finish paperwork, analyses and reviews of safety changes made. The delay came as no surprise, since the original May 15 date was always considered preliminary. The current launch window extends from May 15 to June 3."

Re:Gas Prices

[StratoChief66]

Yeah, but it makes a rocket car look like an albatros when you compare top speeds.

Photos

[Anonymous Coward]

Photos of the shuttle [dpreview.com] from boingboing.net [boingboing.net]'s article on it.

Re:WTF

[rhadamanthus]

As someone who works at NASA on the SSP, let me tell you a well known axiom:

"Every shuttle launch entails putting roughly 4.5 million tons of weight into orbit - and closing out about twice as much weight in paper."

Jokes aside, most of the paperwork is there for a good reason. Every single component on the shuttle is certified for the entire flight envelope. It's quite a challenge.

Re:WTF

[blueturffan]

Would you rather NASA spent hours and hours filling out paper saying how many pins they heard drop this week and how many screws they may have put in the test models or would you rather they spent that time improve technology so we can all bugger off this planet?

I suppose it's a matter of perspective. If I'm strapped to the top of a rocket, I want to be sure that every seemingly trivial detail has been documented and double-checked.

By the way, one of the reasons that NASA was able to return to flight so quickly after the Apollo 13 incident was that they were able to go back and determine exactly what had caused the oxygen tank in the SM to explode. In looking back through the "paperwork", they were able to determine that there were two separate events (tank dropped two inches, and relays not updated to new pad voltage reqirements) that contributed to the explosion. By the way, the tank dropping incident happened two years before the crew was named!

In the Apollo days, they used to joke that they weren't ready to launch until the pile of paperwork matched the height of the rocket. (363 feet)

Re:WTF

[FatAlb3rt]

Except your number is off by a factor of 2000 (lbs not tons) and only about 250k lbs actually makes it to orbit (as someone who formerly worked SSP and now ISS). :) Not to discount your point though - isn't bureacracy great?

Re:All for the best, I suppose.

[joeljkp]

Just for the record, the shuttles have collectively flown 113 missions so far.

Re:YES

[willith]

We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.

This is incorrect. The Saturn V blueprints are safe and completely intact [space.com] on microfilm at MSFC, where they have been since the 1960s. Nothing at all has been lost. From the link:

"The Federal Archives in East Point, Georgia, also has 2,900 cubic feet of Saturn documents," he said. "Rocketdyne has in its archives dozens of volumes from its Knowledge Retention Program. This effort was initiated in the late '60s to document every facet of F 1 and J 2 engine production to assist in any future restart."

Re:YES

[grumbel]

### We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost.

This is incorrect, the reason why we can't build another Saturn V is not because lost papers, all those are still available, but because there are no longer vendors for mid-1960's hardware. See:

http://www.faqs.org/faqs/space/controversy/

This is also the reason why we can't just build another shuttle, while the papes are there, the tools and factories to manufactor them are not. Thus the cost would be higher then a build from scratch.

Re:Some phb needs more time for new ways to screw

[cowscows]

About a hundred shuttle launches, and only two failed. That's not a bad record if you ask me. The space shuttle is one of the most complicated things people have ever done, both technologically, and politically. The fact that it ever flew at all, much less 100 times, is pretty amazing to me.

Not to say that there hasn't been some silly mistakes (you can make a pretty good argument that the basic design of the shuttle wasn't very practical), but I think NASA's safety record is something for them to be proud of.

The political nonsense and bureaucratic mess has certainly made NASA far less useful than that large a group of intelligent engineers should be. There's plenty to criticize them on, but their safety record is pretty darn good.

Your last paragraph doesn't make any sense. They can stop accidents from happening again by shutting down. Other than that, you're going to have to accept that when you're firing rockets up into space, it's dangerous. There's a lot of trial and error on the forefront of technology. How many planes crashed before the Stealth Bomber was developed? A whole lot more than wrecked space ships.

Re:shuttle vs. soyuz

[DerekLyons]

"By no reasonable metric does the Soyuz have a better safety or reliability record than the Shuttle." care to elaborate?

Certainly.

Shuttle 2 - fatal launch accidents. (Columbia is a launch accident even though the effects were not felt until re-entry.) Soyuz 2 - non fatal loss of vehicle and mission accidents.

Shuttle 1 - (minor) nonfatal landing accident. Soyuz 2- fatal re-entry accidents. 3 - non fatal but serious re-entry accidents or incidents. (I.E. they were non fatal mostly by luck.) 6 - non fatal landing accidents. (At least 6 *that we know of*.) Two were nonfatal only by the slimmest of margins.

Shuttle 3 - underperformance incidents (where mission objectives were not achieved or only partially achieved because of vehicle problems), all 3 reflown on later missions. Soyuz - 8 (at least) underperformance incidents all involving complete loss-of-mission, none reflown.

Not to mention the fact that Soyuz has racked all that up in just 89 flights - as opposed to the 113 flights of the Shuttle.

Soyuz's reputation was made in the day when Russia didn't discuss failures, and has been cemented by fanboys and NASA critics who have swallowed the propaganda whole. (Not helped by the fact that NASA co-operated with Russia to downplay the problems, lest they threaten Congressional support for ISS.)

See this report [jamesoberg.com] for some real eye-openers on Soyuz safety, of this one [jamesoberg.com] on MIR.

(oh, and sure, the were recently "accidents" of Soyuz, mainly because some overhaul - but none of them fatal)

There was no 'overhaul' involved with either of the accidents. In fact, we don't know what was involved as the Russians have never admitted to the causes.

It's a grave fallacy to assume that because there were no fatalities an accident is insignificant. NASA made that assumption multiple times - and two Shuttles are dead because of it. Anyone who fails to hold the Russians to the same standard is delusional or dishonest.