Shuttle Makes Rare Night Landing 57
goG writes "After over 200 orbits around the Earth, space shuttle Endeavour landed safely in Florida on Sunday, ending a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. NASA pressed ahead with the Sunday night landing even though poor weather on both coasts threatened any touchdown attempt. Unusually, rain clouds were expected at both Edwards Air Force base in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The return marked just the 23rd time the space shuttle has landed at night, out of 130 flights."
Re:Enjoy 'em while you can, folks (Score:2, Informative)
Hate to be the one to tell you, but it's not like Constellation was going to be flying any time soon (2017-2018 based on latest estimates). SpaceX is likely to be flying sooner than that, same with an Orion-lite on a EELV, and at a cost substantally less than the 40 billion dollars that Ares-1 was going to cost. Plus I'm not sure exactly how they managed to do it, but the proposed replacement was going to cost even more than the Shuttle to operate, while doing substantially less.
BTW Constellation (and Orion) was as much a replacement for STS as a Yugo is for a Ferrari.
The Space Shuttle is done, the decision to wind down the program was made years ago and there are only so many long lead items such as external tanks left. It would take years (and billions) to ramp the production lines back up. Even one of the pads at Kennedy can no longer support Shuttle launches (it was modified for Ares-1X). As much as I love the Shuttle, it is too little too late to save her
Re:Why manned flight? (Score:5, Informative)
It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible)
No, that was a miserable financial failure, not a success. You probably have no idea of the staggering expense of a "reusable" vehicle like the shuttle.
The HST was planned to cost $400M to build and launch. It ended up costing about $2500M because it takes a lot of expensive screwing around to launch on the shuttle. I don't know if the $2500M cost includes the $1500M cost of a shuttle launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope [wikipedia.org]
JWST is going to "cost" about $4500M, but that's a R and D jobs program not a production program. It could be made to cost anything between maybe $1000M and $100000000000000M depending on how many grants they want to farm out (empire building, etc). I also have no idea what they'll use for a launcher based on all the American launcher cancellations. Probably either a Space-X product, or hang the thumb out like a hitchhiker and hope the ESA will bail us out.
Herschel cost about 1100M euros. I don't know if the 1100M euro cost includes the cost of a dirt cheap Ariane 5.
An Ariane 5 only costs about 120M euro, or about one twelfth of a shuttle launch. Or, rephrased, you can launch 12 scopes on an Ariane for the cost of launching 1 scope on the shuttle. Or rephrased, a shuttle launch, with an empty payload bay, costs more than the entire Herschel program, but an Ariane launch is a pretty small line item on any scope launch.
http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ariane5_specs.shtml [spaceandtech.com]
A shuttle launch costs about $1500M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle [wikipedia.org]
Generally speaking, "partially rebuilding" a space telescope costs about as much as launching a new scope on a launcher thats not a joke.
A partially broken down scope seems like a waste, but if it would cost more to fix than to launch a new one... Of course, if we had a freaking assembly line of space telescopes, sort of like a place that Meade has for earthbound scopes, we could probably launch something like a HST or a Herschel for maybe $250M each, plus about $150M for an Ariane5 launch, which would otherwise only pay for about 1/4 of a shuttle repair mission.
Re:Scared the piss out of me, too. (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the landing track:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/428601main_KSC217_mid_nooa.gif [nasa.gov]
Didn't *scare* me, just caught me unaware..."BOOOM! Hey..thunder? Nowait, shuttle!". I just moved to Florida, so the shuttle experiences are new (I drug my ass out of bed at 0400 2 weeks ago to see the sky light up from the night launch).