NASA Postpones Shuttle Launch 159
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."
All for the best, I suppose. (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course, this is also why I think that more effort needs to be put into commercial space vehicles, so as to make spaceflight more commonplace.
WTF (Score:2, Insightful)
WTF is it with paper these days? I mean really! We spend more time doing paperwork then we do anything else. Is it REALLY that important to document every little tiny fact of a pointless job? All I hear from the police is "We need more people or we need less paper work" and it seems it applies to everyone.
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?
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
About time... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Squeeze in the code releases before the launch (Score:3, Insightful)
YES (Score:5, Insightful)
As annoying as it is, that paperwork is important. We cannot make another saturn V because some of the paperwork has been lost. Of course if you wanted to create a new Saturn V you would start from scratch because you want modern technology, but still it would be helpful to know how any why the Saturn V was done the way it was, and what problems they had to work around.
Even when the paperwork is obsolete it is useful to get a picture of where you were.
Paperwork is your checklist. Many times in my life I thought everything was done until I went through the checklist. If you don't do the paperwork you don't know if you checked everything. It would be really a bummer to find that the main fuel tank was never filled, only "topped off" to replace evaporation/leakage while waiting on the pad. (that is just enough fuel to get off the pad, but not enough to get into space) Only by running through a checklist can you be sure that step was done.
Remember the saturn Moon probe of a few months back where they forgot to put turn the radio on in the checklist? The radio wasn't turned on. There are plenty of major mistakes that only doing the paperwork (annoying as it is) can prevent. Of course doing the paperwork won't find problems that aren't in the checklists. The sheare volume of things that need to be done mean that for minor things you sometimes hope someone did it, but live with it when someone forgets.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Frankly, I would rather people spent less effort on trying to find a scapegoat when something goes wrong, and instead spend more effort on stopping things going wrong in the first place.
If the shuttle blows up on the launch pad, finding someone who you can point at and say 'It's all his fault!' won't suddenly make things better again.
Re:Here come the (Score:5, Insightful)
2 questions: why does mankind have to surive the next billion years, or rather, why is it the job of an agency of the US governement to assure such a thing?
2) since multi-cellular organisms didn't really take off until almost half that amount of time ago (600million years ago), primates didn't walk on 2 feet until 4 million years ago (1/250th of that billion years), what in the world^H^H^H^H^H universe makes you think humankind will be around a billion years from now? Whatever is around then will be well beyond our capability to understand or predict. I mean, our species is only 50k years old (1/20,000th of that billion) and already in that span of time has evolved *considerably*. We don't even look like we did 200 years ago, much less 2,000. Do you really think we'll be anything like this 50,000 years from now, and that we'll be even remotely the same *species* as this a million years from now (1/1000th of that billion years). If not, who are you to dictate what their survival will require? Maybe within the next few thousand years we'll finally start doing population control, for instance. There's an idea. All other species seem to do just fine...we should be able to figure it out too, being "smarter" than them.
Re:All for the best, I suppose. (Score:4, Insightful)
Such as?
The only obvious profitable space-based activities are communications satellites and imaging satellites. Both of these have already been privatized.
To address the usual suspects:
1. The novelty of sending rich people into space for jollies is going to wear off real quick. That's not a basis to support an entire space industry.
2. Mining activities don't make sense. The universe is comprised of chemical elements. There are few if any elements available in space that arent' available on earth or can't be substituted by other materials. The only obvious exception, helium isotopes for fusion fuel, would be great except that we most likely won't be using fusion fuel for decades.
Hole in leading edge, not "heat tiles"... (Score:1, Insightful)
shuttle vs. soyuz (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that says everything there is to say about the US space program.
We're putting a lot of effort to put a lame duck platform back in orbit that is going to be decommissioned in 5 years or so anyway with no clear successor and we just kind of ignore the fact that Russia has a time-tested (but not glamorous) platform with a far better safety record.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
If you are going to blame 'someone' you are already doing the wrong thing. Humans make errors, so replacing the human that did the error with another one that will do a similar random error will do nothing to improve the overall situation. To really fix a problem you need to find out how to avoid it in the future, not who is to blame for it. If Jim forgot some screws, the solution is not to replace Jim with Bob, but to let Bob cross check that all screws that Jim placed. It of course can still go wrong, but it requires that both Jim and Bob make an error, which is quite less likly then only one doing an error.
So yes, paperwork is important to track who did what, when and why. The solution to fixing problems lays however in the procedure and much less in the people performing the procedure.
Re:Here come the (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:All for the best, I suppose. (Score:2, Insightful)
Let's compare with one of the largest entertainment driven enterprises in the world: the Olympics. To support itself every 2 years with TV and licensing revenue it generates more hype than most anyone can stand. Their total revenues average out to a couple of $Billion per year. That kind of money isn't going to put a dent in what's required to design, build and run a moon base, whether it's government or private.
The Olympics has the advantage of covering an activity that billions of people have a deep interest in: sports. Only a tiny minority of geeks care about the moon at all. Look at what happened after about Apollo 12: people lost almost all interest.
There is no way that you're going to generate enough hype to support an enterprise many times more expensive than the Olympics that revolves around having a couple of guys kicking around aimlessly in a bubble on the moon. That's just boring, and it's not going to work.
Re:WTF (Score:3, Insightful)
Further, in the event of an accident, the paperwork is not there to provide a scapegoat, but to aid in finding out what went wrong. Maybe the pre-launch sequence of events needs to be adjusted . Maybe some additional tests and checks need to be made. Unless you have paperwork, you'll never be able to tell what went wrong.
Re:Here come the (Score:2, Insightful)
That, and it's silly to say we're not evolving anymore, because we're industrialized or something. What part of "we're only 50k years old..." is hard to grasp? It took 600 million years for the multi-celled orgs to get to what you are today. Give evolution a little bit more of a chance than just what you've seen in your lifetime.
That, and look at the skeleton of someone from 10,000 years ago - we're different. We're much bigger, and our brain cavities are larger. We're definately still evolving.