NASA Redesigning The Space Shuttle 73
ekarjala writes "To avoid wing damage from foam separation in the future, NASA is planning a redesign of the existing shuttle. Seems to me it is time to consider a new design rather than a redesign -- let's take the lessons we've learned and create a space craft for the 21st century rather than re-treading a 30-year-old design."
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:5, Interesting)
Cost per flight
The main idea of a redesign of the shuttle for the new century is that the current system is horribly inefficient and wasteful. Solid fuel boosters are yesterdays news, we need liquid fueled boosters or some new tech that can be controlled and possibly shut off if need be (current ones once lit go untill they're outa fuel that's it). The current external fuel tank (the big on in the middle of the system) just burns up in the atmosphere once it detatches, that's a waste of resources. The shuttle is also much larger than it needs to be, it has yet to consistantly run anywhere near capacity. When designed nasa was anticipating a much larger corporate demand for services of the space shuttle as well as a mandate that it would be able to go retrieve satilites in orbit. That extra space taken out would save lots of money. In short we need a lean mean shuttle machine that does what it needs to for a much lower operating cost than todays shuttle.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
The real question is why are we still using the shuttle? Sure it's one of the better designs for reentry into an atmosphere but there has got to be more efficient and cost effective ways of getting people and objects to space.
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:4, Informative)
Sure. Great. The Shuttle is a great idea for re-entry, if you want to put your trust in a couple of thousand interconnected, interdependent systems, the failure of any one of which will totally doom you.
By comparison, a purely ballistic entry is easy. Do you have the right angle? The right velocity? Is your heat shield intact? Do your parachutes work? Great: go for it.
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:5, Funny)
God Bless America!
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:1)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:3, Funny)
artificial gravity
replicators
warp speed
photon torpedoes
holodecks
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:3, Funny)
Spoiler
Type-R Sticker
Lowering Kit
Neon Paint
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2)
It's not bad. (Score:2, Informative)
The over all effect on the shuttle itself is nil, as far as I can tell from the article.
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:5, Insightful)
The following promises were made to us in the early days of the Shuttle: all these promises have failed to materialize.
It's more of a space Chevy pickup. When I think of trucks, I think of semis--things capable of carrying huge loads over long distances. The Saturn V rocket, the reliable workhorse of the Apollo program, could launch over 250,000 pounds to low Earth orbit or even put men on the moon. The Shuttle, by comparison, can only put 58,000 pounds into low Earth orbit and cannot reach higher orbits. Saturn V rockets made the 250,000-mile trip to the moon not once but several times, while the highest the Shuttle has ever gone is a meager 385 miles (335 nautical miles) during STS-82.
In fact, the Shuttle is so sharply limited that it rarely deploys a satellite directly. Instead, the satellite is mounted to yet another rocket, carried to low orbit in the Shuttle cargo bay, and the second rocket then kicks it into proper orbit. I don't understand the logic: we launch the Shuttle into orbit so we can have astronauts risk life and limb
Endeavour cost $2.1 billion (source [sandia.gov]) and each launch costs $450 million (source [nasa.gov]) per mission. Most of that expense is taken up in refurbishing the Shuttle afterwards, where so much of the Shuttle is disassembled, inspected, replaced and reassembled that it's fair to declare it ``rebuilding'' instead of ``refurbishing''.
More than this, not one single flight component of the Shuttle--not one!--has met its original flight rating. For example, the Shuttle's main engines were originally rated for 27,000 seconds of thrust (about 55 flights). After that time, the engines would have to be replaced. This design goal has not been met. As Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman wrote in the official report on the Challenger disaster, ``[t]he engine now requires very frequent maintenance and replacement of important parts, such as turbopumps, bearings, sheet metal housings, etc.
Between maintenance, rebuilding and inspections, it's not uncommon for a given shuttle to only go up once a year. In Columbia's case, its final mission was its twenty--eighth flight in twenty--two years of service, and its second since 1999. We are nowhere near 26 launches per year per Shuttle; we aren't even close.
Hardly. Each launch costs $450 million. Even if the fleet were capable of 26 launches per shuttle per year, there's no way we could afford it. Instead of costing one hundred dollars to put a pound into orbit (as we were promised by NASA in the 1970s), it costs $7,750 ($450 million per flight, divided by 58,000 pounds of cargo). A 7,650%-cost overrun per flight can be read one and only one way: an engineering failure.
By comparison, the Saturn V rocket could put a pound into orbit for $3,500, and a Russian Proton-M for $2,062.
If the official NASA line of $450 million per flight isn't mind--boggling enough
The first shuttles cost $1.7 billion. Endeavour cost $2.1 billion
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2)
The main costs of the shuttle is mostly fixed. Where things went wrong is that the shuttle requires too much service work between flights. Were they able to fly the shuttle 26 times a year, the cost per flight would go down. But, the afformentioned shuttle rebuild kills that.
With respect to the Proton-M, I think
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:4, Informative)
I agree that a totally different launch solution is needed. But the Proton-M is worth noting and comparing the Shuttle to, if only to show how incredibly, mind-bogglingly atrocious a launch vehicle the Shuttle is. It costs three times as much and has a one-in-fifty chance of snuffing out seven human lives? No thanks.
Re:Why is it bad? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why is it bad? - Disassembly (Score:2)
The shuttle was supposed to be a quick turn-around vechile. Take-off, Do a Mission, Land, Refuel, repeat.
The current cycle is more like this
Take-off (maybe), Do a Mission, Land, Take the Shuttle Apart and fix all the pieces that were cracked, missing, or broken, Refuel, Pray, Repeat.
Don't get me wrong, I am a fan of space flight and can't wait to start work on the first warp driven galaxy class stars
Misleading /. title (Score:5, Informative)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Misleading /. title (Score:4, Informative)
No. When the Columbia broke up, it was travelling at "12,500 mph (Mach 18.3) at an altitude of 207,135ft" [nasa.gov].
It's probably possible build a wind tunnel to simulate a 12,500 MPH wind and simulate the atmosphere at 207,000 feet for an object as big as the orbiter, but it will be very expensive and difficult to build in our political climate.
Re:Misleading /. title (Score:4, Insightful)
However it would be cheap and easy to build in a different political climate. Of course it would have to be a political climate that runs on soy-based biodegradeable pixie dust.
-
Re:Misleading /. title (Score:2)
Re:Misleading /. title (Score:2)
Re:Misleading /. title (Score:1)
Oh, good -- thanks for that info. If you hadn't told me that, I might have had to read the article myself to find out what it said.
Turn it over to the private sector... (Score:3, Insightful)
In any case, if you want to do something about the sad state of the space program, push for giving the private sector the ability to do what NASA does. There is where your real innovation will take place.
Re:Turn it over to the private sector... (Score:1)
Takes a long time (Score:5, Insightful)
Also John Glenn has several times stated that the science is important and that the ISS needs to got to full staffing of 6 or 7 ASAP. The re-entry sphere would allow that to happen rapidly and is likely why he supports that idea.
Disclaimer : I do live in the Huntsville area, but I am not in anyway affliated with Marshall SFC or NASA.
Re:Takes a long time (Score:2, Insightful)
"Airplanes fall out of the sky, and you don't stop flying," Glenn said.
If planes fall out of the sky at a rate of 1 in every 57 you do stop flying. You can take my word on it. In fact, if 1 in 57 cars on the road suffered a mechanical failure that resulted in the death of 7 people you can bet people would stop driving them too.
Re:Takes a long time (Score:3, Insightful)
If they would launch me in a shuttle tomorrow, I would go happily. I would bet that a large number of
Compare these explorers with explorers of times past. Columbus lost large numbers of his crew,
Re:Takes a long time (Score:2)
I'm sure that everytime explorer's in the past grabbed every oportunity to 1) reduce cost and 2) increase the chances of a successful mission by using better, newer hardware. Also consider that the rate of techological innovation in the life-time of the explo
Re:Takes a long time (Score:1)
No matter how "safe" you make it, the very act of turning those engines on and running them up to speed will always carry the risk of self-destruction. The fact that the SSME's have never blown themselves apart strikes
Re:Takes a long time (Score:2)
Your analogy doesn't really work. Back then, long, dangerous voyages were the only way to explore the new world. These days, we have many effective ways to explore space from Earth, and I think it's quite hard to justify sending people to "discover" things we already know about.
I mean, that's not really exploration, is it?
Flip side (Score:1)
In some respect you can consider a new design version 2 and we could apply some of the things we learned from our existing shuttle, but with the new design comes new technology which will have a similar path of ironing.
I am not saying a new design is a bad idea, just that we have a si
Re:Flip side (Score:4, Insightful)
Evidence indicates that several kinks and problems remain.
Think of it in terms of software, which do you think works better: version 1.0 or version 9?
In terms of software, we're on space shuttle version 1.99.99.99. We have tremendously smothed the wrinkles in an existing design, but the specifications at creation and the current necessary specifications and available technologies are radically different. This is not as simple as saving space and weight by using LCD moniters instead of CRT's... Could shuttle subsystems communicate more efficiently over 802.11b? Should liquid, nuclear, or ElectroMagnetic accelerants be used in place of solid fuel boosters? Should the shuttle carry less weight in order to carry payload to a higher orbit? Escape pod?
For crying out loud NASA engineers still scour Ebay looking for parts to keep the shuttle fleet up in the air. Isn't it about time we put a PowerPC or a P4 up in the air?
Maturity of a technology involves both incremental and radical redesigns... Such a process brought Win95, NT, XP, and someday a mature Windows OS. Mac OS9 was a very mature OS (based off of an OS7 lineage), but it was just too old and, in some ways, too mature to jerry rig preemptive multitasking into it.
Now that the shuttle has followed its natural lifecycle we are in the enviable position of looking at its role in the larger world and saying what is it being used for and, using our experience, how can we better design it to serve that need?
I am not saying a new design is a bad idea, just that we have a significant investment in our current shuttle and thats why it has been around so long.
Sadly, pouring good money after bad isn't going to help our prospects long-term. The costs are sunk, and can't be recouped. If designing and implementing a new shuttle costs 50 billion dollars, but the per-launch costs can be reduced from 450 million to 100 million, then assuming an acellerated launch schedule of one flight every two weeks (the original estimates for the original shuttle), we will have a net financial gain after less than 5 years. And besides the financial gain, who knows what the value of the scientific gain by having a shuttle capable of such frequent voyages.
(Yes the above numbers are somewhat spurious, but they also don't take into account the 2-4 billion dollars per current shuttle with a 50 flight lifespan, the cost of investigation of a shuttle disaster, the potential for reduced personnel in a more modern system, etc)
Re:Flip side (Score:3, Insightful)
Even if there *was* an escape pod it would be useless in a reentry situation, at least with the way we do reentries right now. The number and strength of the forces acting on the shuttle during the reentry phase make escape pods high impractical if not impossible. Besides, there probably wouldn't be enough time to get into an escape vehicle.
Junk the Shuttle -- and ISS while you're at it. (Score:5, Insightful)
Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.
The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."
The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.
Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.
It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.
It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.
Let's do it over. And do it right.
Re:Junk the Shuttle -- and ISS while you're at it. (Score:1)
obvious (Score:4, Interesting)
First the money part: while in the long run it will cost more to keep the old fleet alive rather than build new, cheaper shuttles, the short term investment is much lower for the redesign. Especially in this day and age with a monster defecit.
Second, commitment. We have a manned space station up there. On that (this is a guess) will not stand up well to be un-manned. Yes, we have russian rockets we can use, but nasa isn't too happy about not having a backup method to get people up/down. A new shuttle would take 5-10 years to design, build, and test. By that time, all the money invested in the space station would be a waste it it was un-manned for so long.
just my 2 cents.
Sure... but 1)time and 2)$$$ (Score:5, Interesting)
But let's look at something:
Time
- It would take minimum of 10 years to design, build, and test a working model.
- We've got the ISS flying right now that needs service and crew changes-- and more often than the Russian Soyuz can provide. While I'm on the Soyuz-- their last flight wasn't so hot either. That was a new model, too. Did you know it takes 18 mos. to build a Soyuz capsule? Did you know they barely have enough money and crew to meet the six month demand for the ISS? Do you trust the Russians to go drum up people from the unemployment line to ramp up production? Do you... ah, nevermind.
- Space is not easy or safe. The fact that we've only lost three crews in forty years of space flight is totally remarkable! It is not a safe environment. Tito and the other dude who flew on the Soyuz took their life into their own hands-- and hell I would do the same in a heartbeat! But it is not safe. It is extremeley dangerous and every astronaut knows that. Citizens forget that.
Money- It will take billions of dollars to pick one of the many designs for the next orbital plan/vehicle, build and test ONE.
- We also face increased spending on defense, security, and welfare. (Damn terrorists, criminals, lazybones, and old folks) Which one will you cut?
People see NASA's record and watch Enterprise every week and think it's an easy thing. It is not!I TOTALLY agree that we do need a new vehicle. But we can't just mothball the Shuttle and stick 'em in museums. They have to be toughened up and fly for the next ten years until the new vehicle is ready. I REALLY want a new vehicle now! But I am fatally realistic: the shuttle will be permanently grounded, the borrowcrats will cut NASA some more causing the space plane to take too long, and the ISS will probably do the SpaceLab thing.
Give the entrepeneurs a chance (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Give the entrepeneurs a chance (Score:1)
But that's essentially what happens. Just NASA maintains ownership of the shuttle. NASA didn't build the thing. They didn't do all the design work either. A contractor did. The system works something like this: someone says, We need... A list of proposals is created. Contractors make suggestions and place bids. One of the contractors wins the bids on the merits of the proposal and the price they say they can do it at. It's built.
Yeah, that's logical... (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree. Throw out all the stuff that's proven to work 130 times and replace it with brand new stuff.
Not shuttle redesign (Score:2)
Good use of money? Bad use of statistics! (Score:2)
NASA will spend of order $100 million per life saved to make the shuttle safer. Are astronauts really worth so much more than the rest of us?
Meanwhile, nobody seems to have noticed that the rate of shuttle losses is completely statistically consistent with what NASA has been telling us all along:
According to NASA, the probability of a critical failure was 1 in 145 before 1998 and 1 in 2
A flaw in your reasoning (Score:1)
Re:A flaw in your reasoning (Score:3, Insightful)
After the last shuttle crashes, we could ask whether the research conducted on the shuttle was more productive in saving lives per
Big Contract with Estes Rocket Corp? (Score:2)
Suggestion (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Suggestion (Score:2)
Maybe Rockets aren't the answer (Score:2, Informative)
Perhaps we have a workable alternative to rockets available. Rockets are a terrifically inefficient way to get, essentially, a 1 to 8 hour drive straight up. In order to do that we have to spit 100 times our mass out the back. That's a lot of commotion and expense and danger. If the tech shown here actually works, it might
Informative? (Score:2)
Re:Informative? (Score:1)
For flight in air, there's no question that it works. And there may be many applications there, either alone or in conjunction with neutral buoyancy - hybrid blimps with electrokinetic lift enhancement and p
Electrokinetics (Score:2)
Given that gasoline has an energy density of 12.3 watt hours per gram [spinglass.net], and gasoline can be readily converted to electricity at 40% efficiency, it should be very easy for you to make a VTOL flying car with a 3-to-1 fuel-to-structure weight ratio that would hover in the air for an hour or two.
Let us know when you've built i
Hermes anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)
Cut space efforts into two parts:
1.Launching payloads. Ariane 5, Deltas etc can and do this very well. These launchers are designed for lifting satellites, and other heavy payloads into geostationary orbit and beyond.
2.Launching humans. A small purpose designed craft like the Hermes, that can return to earth like the shuttle, AND be launched on top of a heavy lifter such as Ariane 5 is far more practical than the shuttle could be.
But perhaps Americans dislike the idea too much that it's originally French, and perhaps the French can't afford to pay for this anymore.
Make the X-prize bigger (Score:1)
NASA could specify rules - the contender must be able to lift so much for so much cash - it must be reusable to whatever degree and cost so much per flight.
Perhaps we need seperate categories for manned / cargo lifters
There probably need to be some rules on risk and the environment as well. Keep the rules simple though and make a big prize.
Then we