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Space The Almighty Buck Science

Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA? 284

Posted by michael from the riding-the-rocket dept.
l8f57 writes "Hal Gerham (from the NASA CAIB report) is calling for cargo and people to be separated into different missions. He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle."
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Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA? More

Separate Cargo and Personnel Missions for NASA?

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  • Is This Wise? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Urantian ( 263132 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:41PM (#6881663)
    Separate the cargo from the crew? That might make sense, but it raises other concerns. It is indeed a tragedy when a shuttle is lost. The crew, the ship, and the cargo are lost.

    Are they attempting to minimize the impact of potential losses by proposing this separation? We already know that NASA projected the odds of losing a shuttle. What is it, about than 1 out of 200 or so missions could be a loss? What are the odds of losing both the crew and cargo shuttles during the same mission? If the shuttle carrying the crew is lost, they will be able to continue the mission of the cargo with a new crew, if they can avoid obvious delays.

    I realize that NASA may be applying logic about how to make their missions safer, however it appears they are more concerned about protecting themselves, and their bottom line. The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects.

    This story reminds me of the movie Capricorn One. NASA was shown as running scared, doing anything necessary to cover their mistakes.

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The odds are more like 1 in 65 for losing a shuttle.

      • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:5, Insightful)

        by gantzm ( 212617 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:49PM (#6881744)
        Sorry, you are wrong. So if I purchase a lottery ticket tonight and win, are my odds now 1 in 1 of winning the lottery if I purchase another ticket? Past performance does not dictate future performance a string of close spaced events will most likely be outweighed put future events being spaced further apart.

        • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:2, Insightful)

          by 91degrees ( 207121 )
          No, but if you purchase 130 lottery tickets and win twice, then one might suspect that the odds of winning are roughly 1 in 65. The difference here is that this can be calculated mathematically.

          For shuttle failures, the only data we have is past performance. The odds of catstrophic failure are 1 in 65, but the error margin is pretty vast.

          • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Interesting)

            by gantzm ( 212617 )
            Actually no. The Challenger accident was not a statistical failure of the shuttle so it should not be included. Engineers knew the boosters were being operated outside of their specifications. Once someone decides to launch outside of operating parameters all bets are off. So your past performance for at least one failure shouldn't count because you were operating outside of specs.

            • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Insightful)

              by realdpk ( 116490 )
              That there exists the option for them to operate outside of specifications means that it can be counted as a statistical failure for the shuttle program - that is, the entire shuttle system, not just the hardware components.
              • There exists no system in the world that can prevent you from operating outside of specifications. That's what specs are for, this item rated to operate within these parameters. How could you build such a complex system? A giant asteroid hitting the earth would be operating the shuttle out of spec, I don't know any engineers that can build a shuttle that automatically prevents asteroids from hitting the earth. Your argument is a strawman argument.
                • Not that I agree with you, but let me ask you this - do we know, for a fact, that every one of the successful shuttle missions has been operated within the specifications, in every way? If not, can we use those to signify statistical successes?

                  Now, regarding specifications. If the engineers knew it was operating outside of spec, they must have had a test for it. The test probably involved equipment of some sort - equipment that probably could have aborted the launch. However, because people are involved he
                  • I don't disagree with what you are saying, but I don't see how someone could build a system such as you describe. There are millions of pieces and parts in the shuttle system. How do you design a system, in the real world, that can magically compute every piece of data and produce a fail safe system? One of the checks before launch is some guy flying a plane around downrange to make sure nobody is out there in case of an abort. In your scenario we would have to remove this person and automate this proce
            • Engineers knew the boosters were being operated outside of their specifications.

              Huh? Please don't tell me you're talking about the SSMEs operating at 104%. See item A.3 [geocities.com]. O'wise, what performance specs were being violated?

              • No, Challenger was operating outside it's minimum reccommended ambient air temperature when launched. This caused the "O" ring failure and the large *kaboom* afterward.

              • The Solid Rocket Boosters were being operated below there rated operating temperature, i.e. it was too damn cold to launch the shuttle. Everybody who wasn't a manager who worked on these things knew this.
                I'm note sure were to find this particular data. But when the engineers at the company who built these things say "Hmmm, it's probably not a good idea to launch in this cold weather." Somebody should rethink pushing the launch button.

          • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:2, Interesting)

            by stratjakt ( 596332 )
            One might suspect the odds are 1 in 65, but they'd be wrong. If I flip a coin twice and get heads both times, I might suspect the odds of getting heads are 1 in 1.

            All you're saying that the ratio of failures to successes is 1:65, this has nothing to do with oddsmaking, though it could be a parameter.

            Go to Vegas and have a chat with some real oddsmakers. The fact that some sports team is 12 and 5 for the season doesnt mean they have 12:5 odds for the superbowl.

      • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Politburo ( 640618 )
        That is the observed rate of shuttle loss.

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:44PM (#6881695) Journal
      I believe this is about minimizing cost and lead times, not risk reduction.

      I think the idea is that each type of ship would have different requirements, so you could design each to meet the requirements of its cargo, be it human or stuff.

      Ie; a cargo shuttle full of tiny screws to be sorted in space doesnt need fancy atmospheric systems and oxygen recirculators and a seven million dollar toilet, etc.

      The Russians did this, all through Mir. They had the Soyuz (sp?) rockets for people, and another kind to send supplies up. Or something like that.

      • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:2, Informative)

        by a_ghostwheel ( 699776 )
        It was Soyuz (replaced with Soyuz-T and later with Soyuz-TM) for people (and minimum cargo) and Progress (Progress-M now) for pure cargo.

        And they both are actively used even now with ISS.

        Plus, on top of that Russians have Energiya rocket, capable of lifting up to 100 tonns (value is subject to memory error) - much more than Shuttle can. However this rocket was used only once I think - during Buran launch (Russian analog of shuttle) and I am not sure whether or not they still have it operational.

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mschoolbus ( 627182 )
      The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace

      Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?

      • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:5, Funny)

        by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMike@gmail. c o m> on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:57PM (#6881814) Journal
        Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?

        If they sent up DVDs so the astronauts could watch movies, they could not replace them since the MPAA wouldn't let them rip a backup copy before the mission left.

      • Impossible is a bit of hyperbole there, but it is widely known that NASA carries some cargo that is extremely, extremely expensive. So expensive that a mission failure might preclude a replacement of the cargo due to overwhelming cost and insufficient funds. The cost to develop and launch the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, for example, was 2 billion dollars.
      • Well there's *literally* irreplaceable, and then there's "practically" irreplacable -- in that, the people involved in creating the original are more likely to simply accept the loss than re-create it.

        Interplanetary probes are a good example -- more because of scheduling than production. I have trouble imagining them re-making the Hubble telescope (or it's upcoming replacements) if they were lost during launch, as well. I mean, *maybe* they would, but it's not guaranteed.

        Conversely -- and this was the aut
      • True, but time is money. Having to build and/or launch a replacement may not be feasible. Take, for example, the building sequence of the space station. You may not be able to continue construction if you are missing a key component...

      • Name one thing that they would need to bring up as cargo, that NASA could not replace....?

        I read about a billion-dollar satellite with no backup getting blown-up on liftoff. While not impossible to replace a billion-dollar satellite, getting more funding for it might be.

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by RevMike ( 632002 ) <revMike@gmail. c o m> on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:53PM (#6881789) Journal
      Separate the cargo from the crew? ... The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects.

      I don't think this is really what they intend. I think their fundamental premise is that the shuttle is needlessly complex - and therefore expensive and possibly dangerous - because it has to do too many missions at once. Operating a simple/cheap/reliable crew vehicle and a separate lift capability, which need not be as reliable, might be more effective.

      This is the model that the Soviet space program followed: Soyuz (sp?) for crew and Progress for cargo. It has been effective. The Russian crew vehicle, I believe, only failed once in history.

      I don't think the issue is cargo cost, either. The cargo is usually not very expensive compared to the cost of the launch. The issue is that an accident with a crewed vehicle puts us out of the manned space flight game for at least close to a year. When an Atlas rocket is lost, everyone says "oh well" and they launch again in a few weeks. Not so with a manned craft.

      • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Informative)

        by red floyd ( 220712 )
        Twice.

        Komarov's parachute failed.
        The atmosphere seals failed and three cosmonauts returning from Salyut died.

        I'm ashamed to admit that I don't remember the cosmonauts' names.
        • Thanks, I knew about Soyuz 11/Salyut 1, but I didn't know about Soyuz 1. BTW, the cosmonauts in Soyuz 11 were Georgy Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov and Viktor Patsayev. Regards, Mike

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Smidge204 ( 605297 )
      Safety is the ultimate goal, yes.

      From the article, the point of seperating crew and cargo improves safety because they both have different requirements, and seperate vehicles can be tailored to their specific needs rather than trying to be an "all in one" solution.

      In short, you can build a passenger craft and focus on making it safe, then make a seperate cargo craft and focus on making is cost effective. Since there stands to be much more cargo than crew going into space at any given time, seperating the
    • I think you are missing the point. Separating the crew and cargo is not solely for safety.

      When you only send cargo you do not have to keep it alive. Hence all the complexitites of the life support systems need not be included.

      On your crew missions the ship does not need to be as large so it is more agile, uses less fuel. In design you don't have to take into account as many factors about cargo hauling either. Just people moving. Simplifies it somewhat.
    • Nope, it's not because he want to minimize impact

      OK, it's easier to make a small, safe man rated vehicle, so you make a "Passenger Only" (well, a SMALL amount of cargo, but no cargo bay)
      shuttle. Just think, this shuttle doesn't need the ability to energency land with a big honking payload in the back, you don't need boosters to launch that big honking payload. It's just SAFER

      Then you launch your cargo on "BDB" - Big Dumb Boosters. They don't have to be man rated, no return from orbit, etc

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by AlecC ( 512609 ) <aleccawley@gmail.com> on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:19PM (#6882001)
      I think this idea is post shuttle, not separate human/cargo shuttle flights. You design a small, safe dedicated people carrier. 4 seats, about the size of a small business jet. Payload - 4 human beings, kept very safe. Allow each human half a ton, including space suit, enough oxygen and water for a couple of days in orbit in case things go wrong. No food - you wont starve in two days - and minimal toilet facilities. Payload two tons. Keep one on standby for rescue duty; can launch unmanned, so can bring back 4 astronauts in a hurry. Don't compromise the design for military reasons, as the shuttle was; the cold war is over and anyway it will only carry people, so secret gismos.

      Send the cargo up on disposables - Atlas, Delta, Ariane. We know how to build them, and their 99% reliability is acceptable for cargo whereas it would be totally unacceptable for freight.

      The people carrier may be re-usable; it will be relatively light and will carry a lot of expsnsive safety equipment. But let the engineers decide, not the politicians. If disposable is cheaper, for the desired level of safety, go disposable. Probably not all disposable - it might have something like the Saturn's launch escape tower.

      Once you have a component, rather than monlithic, system, you can start on other interesting developments like a dedicated Earth Orbit to Lunar Orbit ferry - and so on. You make rational decisions instead of being blinkered by a huge white elephant. The ISS, while (currently) needing the shuttle, also makes it obsolete: it provides a rendezvous point for people and cargo.
    • "What are the odds of losing both the crew and cargo shuttles during the same mission"

      I believe you are confused, based on my reading of the article and understanding of the US space program. The advice was, as I understood it, a call to run parallel mission tracks: one to deliver astronauts back and forth, and another (presumably unmanned) to deliver cargo. I don't think they intend to fly two shuttles at once, or if they even intend both tracks to involve shuttles. To be honest, I think flying two shutt
    • This story reminds me of the movie Capricorn One. NASA was shown as running scared, doing anything necessary to cover their mistakes.

      We get what you're saying, something about paranoia -- but this story reminds you of fiction in which NASA faked the moon landings and is involved in a murderous, high-stakes coverup involving murdering astronauts?

      Um, maybe you want to call Fox and tell them you've got a new investigative special... Or did they run that one?

    • It is absolutely wise. The biggest thing is the cost of cargo rated rockets versus man rated rockets. There is a whole level of safety, checks, build processes, etc. that go with building any rocket which will launch a human. The second most expensive rockets are the systems that launch expensive satellites into orbit (multi million dollar satellites). For resupply the space station you would only need the most basic of rocket systems, especially for things like food, water, clothing, movies, music, etc
    • You're missing the point. Separating the crew and cargo is so that:

      The crew can be carried up and down in a smaller, simplier, more reliable vehicle.

      Human crews aren't being used to transport cargo back and forth to the ISS, when an unmanned launch can accomplish the same thing.

      The CAIB did endorse using the shuttle to carry up the remaining pieces of the ISS which were designed to fit into the cargo bay; however, they're suggesting (in the strongest language short of saying that the shuttle needs to b

    • Re:Is This Wise? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by arivanov ( 12034 )
      Nothing of the kind. It is more in the context of the new orbital plane design. It is not in the context of current shuttle operations.

      Think of the shuttle as an SUV. It is qute and you like the way it looks. It also sucks on-road (compared to a proper car). It sucks off-road (compared to a real offroader). It can carry less then a proper truck. And it eats resources for breakfast, lunch and dinner (fuel, oil, maintenance, so on so forth).

      So what this guy is advocating is the obvious idea. Have a decent v
    • "The cargo is expensive, and may be impossible to replace. The crew CAN be replaced. It's just like corporations, in how they manage their infrastructure and employees. The employees are unfortunately expendable in many respects."

      NASA pays for programs not cargo. It isn't like the experiments are made of gold or some precious metal. It is the man hours that are put into the development that cost so much money. Just as it is the man hours spent training the crew that make each person very valuable in ter

  • Maybe, but.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by ChrisHanel ( 636741 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:42PM (#6881674) Homepage Journal
    Ironically, the astronaut's luggage would accidentaly be rerouted to Topeka.

  • Great, another opportunity to lose my luggage once I cough up the $20M.

  • satellites (Score:2, Interesting)

    by photoblur ( 552862 )
    Cargo is already sent up separately from crews... it's just that people have never really tried to meet back up with it...
  • Perhaps it would be more cost-efficient to have a single-use ship system, but we have proven the ability to reuse the ship, and thus we have a responsibility to the universe to not produce more space junk than is absolutely necessary. There is no way to know if one of our spent space capsules, drifting off into the far reaches, might cause some other dawning civilization irreperable harm. Thus, we should use our tech ability to limit the abuse of the prime directive.

    • Re:Easier to have single-use ships? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ChrisHanel ( 636741 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:50PM (#6881756) Homepage Journal
      ...thank goodness we're not in the Federation yet, or we might have to worry about that.

      Seriously, our ability to send any kind of material close to effecting another civilization of any kind is nil. We can't even get next door without hyperventilating, let alone outside the solar system to throw garbage on Spock's lawn.

      Let's just have this conversation again in 100 years, k?

      • And without our space junk, what will the Klingons of the future have to use for target practice while waiting for a hapless Federation ship to come by?

        You have to think ahead.
      • Last I heard, a nuclear rocket would take 1,000 years jsut to get to proximus centari and that is only our nearest neigbor. Want to send shit to the closest star in the Taurus constellation? It'll take 25,000 years. Only recently will one of our probes (one of the pioneer series I think) actually truly leaving the solar system. Plus the odds of any of it hitting a planet are extremely astronomically low. Even if it did it would burn up in the atmosphere of said planet. And if you can find that crap in space
      • More like 100k years.
    • There is no way to know if one of our spent space capsules, drifting off into the far reaches, might cause some other dawning civilization irreperable harm.

      And that civilization might be technology based, and send out a probe to find the earth, and on the way destroy all of humanity. Oh and when it gets to earth the probe might send out whale songs. And then a certain Captain James T. Kirk would be forced to take his stolen klingon bird of prey back in time by slingshotting around the sun, A manuver tha

      • Captain James T. Kirk would be forced to take his stolen klingon bird of prey back in time by slingshotting around the sun, A manuver that has never been done before!

        That whole story was blown *WAY* out of proportion. Basically, me and Scotty went back looking for Scotch and babes.

        I got lucky, he came back with an antique computer...

  • Sure makes sense for large missions (Score:5, Insightful)

    by scottganyo ( 65515 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:48PM (#6881738)
    For example, if you were planning to start a colony on Mars, you could use cheaper methods to send the suppies to the planet ahead of time. Then, use the most reliable methods to send the people. The whole enterprise would be cheaper, you could use the most reliable methods to ensure that the colonists would arrive safely, and you could guarantee that the supplies would be waiting for the colonists when they did arrive.

  • ENTER the space elevator (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Chuck Bucket ( 142633 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:52PM (#6881770) Homepage Journal
    This makes sense, and I'd love to see something like the space elevator [nasa.gov] that Arthur C. Clarke's brought up in Fountains of Paradise happen. This way, cargo could be brought up, followed by crew if the cargo run was successful.

    An article written about the idea, this year:

    Space Elevators Maybe Closer To Reality Than Imagined [spacedaily.com]

    Much more info here:

    The Space Elevator Reference [spaceelevator.com]

    CB

  • Telecommuting is where it's at! One would think that outer space would be a perfect place for astronauts to telecommute. The only reason we still send people into space is to put a human face on billions of dollars - which works well until things start going wrong (an interesting parallel with Iraq).
    • Yes, exactly. I've been looking for arguments for sending actual people up in to space still, other than for specifically observing what happens to people in space. Why can't the rest of the experiments be automated, or done with robotics of some sort? What makes them so special/fragile/weird?
      • People can fix things in orbit, like the Hubble.

        People can build things in orbit. Like the ISS.

        People can run experiments too complex to do remotely. Like on the Shuttle or ISS.

        If everything dangerous was done remotely, we'd all still be living in Europe/Asia/Africa.

        As Mary Schaeffer (I think) of NASA at Ames/Dryden said, "Insisting on perfect safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world."

        And keep in mind - if all you do is telecommute, you'll never see the sights along the
    • Yeah, but once you get past LEO the latencies are killer!

      Try playing Quake with the server on the moon! That's a 2.5 second round trip latency!

      Or for regular work telecommuting, the latency to mars is at best about 6 minutes round trip (round numbers: 35million/186000).

  • Just what we need... more logistics! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Not_Wiggins ( 686627 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:54PM (#6881794) Journal
    NASA: "In order to ensure the safety of the crew in flight, we're shipping all the dangerous gases, such as highly explosive oxygen, up separately."

    (hours after launch)

    NASA: "Um... we have good news and bad news. The good news is the crew made it into space without a hitch. The bad news is all the cargo that was supposed to go with them was lost due to a malfunction. Errrmmm... how long can you guys hold your breath up there?"

  • This is a good thing (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dav3K ( 618318 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:54PM (#6881797)
    I agree with this. By separating out the cargo, the personel-carrying missions can actually become more predictable (less variance due to cargo weights) and are unencumbered with the reusability goals. This means Safety can always be the primary goal for person-carrying missions.

    Cargo missions are a much more appropriate area to experiment with reusability or cost-lowering goals as the failure costs are significantly lower. NASA would have a much easier time explaining how they blew up a $40 billion cargo payload to the press compared to the media frenzy created when an astronaut dies.

    Just look at the media attention given to this last disaster - how much was covering the loss of human life and how much was covering the financial losses incurred?
    • Funny thing is, though, NASA doesn't send up the shuttle with a satelite to dump into orbit, it already sends up a single shot rocket with the payload on board. It has no need of human interaction, it's launch time is flexible, it is self deploying.

      What kind of Cargo the shuttle carries is more like specialized laboratories built to fit into the cargo bay, special kinds of cargo that need someone there to put it together, parts for repair, devices that were not meant to stay in orbit, or something similar.

    • Re:This is a good thing (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Graff ( 532189 )

      By separating out the cargo, the personel-carrying missions can actually become more predictable (less variance due to cargo weights) and are unencumbered with the reusability goals.

      I've got an even better reason for sending up seperate cargo missions: you can leave the containers up in orbit.

      See, you have just spent a lot of cash to boost tons of container material up into space. Why would you then waste the money spent to get it up there when you could instead re-use the containers themselves? If th

  • Good for them (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Burgundy Advocate ( 313960 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:56PM (#6881808) Homepage
    I think something many people overlook is that large-scale shuttle type vehicles are extremely complex and difficult to engineer. We can't just slap one together and put it on top of one of our current rockets -- nothing is big enough to launch a similar vehicle!

    By seperating the system into two less-complex vehicles, they can focus more on the specifics of both vehicles. Instead of making a jack-of-all-trades, good-at-none "solution", the engineers can focus on making sure each vehicle does it's mission well.

    As for non-reusable -- so what! For now, that might be the way to go. Perhaps in the near future the system can be modified with next-generation technology, but again, simplicity is where it's at. Let's not make another overly complex mostrosity with tens of thousands of pseudo-redundant interconnected systems.
    • As for non-reusable -- so what! For now, that might be the way to go. Perhaps in the near future the system can be modified with next-generation technology, but again, simplicity is where it's at. Let's not make another overly complex mostrosity with tens of thousands of pseudo-redundant interconnected systems.

      There is no reason a simple time tested capsule system couldn't be mostly reusable. A bigger point is that a "plane" vehicle is needlessly complex, expensive, and dangerous. The problem is that m

    • I fully agree with you. In general, building something that can handle two different tasks with different constraints is more error-prone than building two separate things.

      Cargo is bulky, heavy, but does not require very high safety, nor life sustenance systems. Passengers are less bulky, lighter, but do require high safety and life sustenance systems (air, water, food, toilets...). Those are two different sets of requirements. Remember that NASA and other space agencies do not have unbounded budgets; it's

  • Re-usable is only the cheapest when... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cmowire ( 254489 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @01:58PM (#6881827) Homepage
    You are using it all the time.

    We really haven't explored the limits of reusability or expendability.

    If we were to contract out for expendable boosters, built in as cheaply and expendably as possible in batches of 100, it would end up with the launch costs way below what they are now. Our current batch of expendable boosters are far too complicated and are built far too slowly to give us savings like this. This is what is called the "Big Dumb Booster" notion.

    The shuttle is a poor example of reusable boosters. The cost for refurbishing between launches, maintaining an army of technicians, etc. is incredible. If we were able to fly one, with the same safety and without appreciable yearly budget increase, once every week, the shuttle would start to look good.

    The CAIB's trying to say what has been repeated over and over and over again. One of the reasons why the shuttle has problems is because they tried to create one space vehicle that can do everything. It's like trying to combine a sedan, truck, and crane into one vehicle.

    And it's probably easier to build an inexpensive production-grade partially or fully reusable craft before somebody gets a better idea if it just has to do one or the other.

  • Its about engineering economics (Score:4, Insightful)

    by numakris ( 684589 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:00PM (#6881843) Homepage
    When you return with a ship of empty space (the cargo bay empty) you are paying an aoerodynamic PRICE. By discarding the cargo transporter, you save because that aerodynamic cost is left in orbit. The aerodynamic cost of the capsule to earth is TINY. That way you can bring back the crew in a capsule,which is easier and safer. So they have to splash down in the ocean, big frickin deal.
  • buying a couple used Soyuz craft from Russia, and spending a few million to mod them up to NASA's specs? Russia needs the money, the U.S wants an alternative to the shuttle. Win, win? I'm sure it will never happen, but just a thought I had when reading this story.

  • Irony of Ironies (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jeremy Erwin ( 2054 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:03PM (#6881868) Journal
    The Columbia mission wasn't a cargo mission. It wasn't even an ISS mission. It was scientific mission using SpaceHab.

  • We do this today with airlines (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Uncle Op ( 541486 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:04PM (#6881879)
    Every day we separate people transport needs from cargo moving needs. The major people movers may also have a cargo arm (or vice versa), but they usually do them in frames that are perhaps similar but implemented for their specific tasks. Sure, some stuff doubtless travels with people in the cargo/luggage hold (though 9/11 may have stopped some of that), and we saw in CastAway that Tom Hanks was one of a handful of crew/passengers on the FedEx plane. But we have been sending unmanned rockets up for a long time.

    So it does make sense for both viable manned and unmanned space flight. I just don't want to see all space exploration done by wire because, ultimately, it just doesn't feel right.

    Reusability is orthogonal to this, I think, though once again it Just Makes Sense to reuse what you can. There are extremes that we don't need to go to, though. There aren't too many times I've really wanted a reusable cable tie, for instance.

  • Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by cybercuzco ( 100904 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:06PM (#6881895) Homepage Journal
    Finally, somone talking some sense about NASA. Its really stupid to send up the crew and the cargo simultaneously. Cargo missions can have a higher margin of error, which translates into cheaper. They can also be one use, which for the time being also translates to cheaper. Cargo by its nature is heavy, so its wiser to make a big cheap nonreusable cargo rocket and send things up that way. Most cargo on earth is not transported by Jet airplane, most is transported by ocean going ship or train. We need a container ship for space, and a little jet airplane for the people. Further, the smaller the craft the fewer parts it needs and the simpler it can be made. So by its very nature a smaller ship can be made safer than a larger more complex one.

    Ultimately NASA needs to get back to its beginnings. NASA does the big expensive but basic R&D needed for commercial companies to take over. NASA should have a baseline rocket engine research program continually ongoing. They need to have a standard model rocket engine that is continually upgraded and simplified. the design is then published annually for any and all to use (with security clearance) Same needs to be done with tanks, guidance and control systems, reentry systems, spacesuits, life support systems etc.

  • Should we scrap the shuttle now? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by adeyadey ( 678765 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:10PM (#6881924) Journal
    Why continue to run the shuttle? Why not just use the money for fast development of new vehicles? Cheaper to buy Soyuz/Progress rockets from the Russians for now..

    Now isnt that ironic - The US would end up having to buy what is essentially much the same rocket that Uri Gagarin used in 1961.. :-)
    • If they scrap the Shuttle now (as in, "It will never fly again, period.") then the ISS is doomed. The Russians don't have enough rockets in the factories to provide enough crew / supply / orbit boost missions in the next 2 - 3 years to keep the ISS up, even if NASA gave them all the money. And it'll take NASA 5 years to get a new crew launch system (assuming a reasonably fast, not-quite-Apollo crash program).

      What's most likely is that NASA will say, "OK, we'll spend what it takes to keep Shuttle flying fo

  • Gehman Is Absolutely Right (Score:4, Insightful)

    by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:10PM (#6881929)
    Admiral Gehman is right. I hope someone is paying attention. He's right because there is no requirement to add a Shuttle crew to a flight that delivers cargo to the ISS. He's right because making a vehicle system safe enough for humans wastes money if the vehicle is also used to carry cargo.

    There's too much emphasis on debates about winged spaceplanes versus Apollo-derived capsules; too much debate about reusability versus expendable boosters.

    Let's be sensible. If you need to send tons of cargo from New York to Los Angeles, you can stuff into a truck or a freight train. That is, a vehicle deisgned to carry cargo. If you want to send your family from New York to Los Angeles, you would put them on an airplane, a bus, or drive them there in your car. In other words, a vehicle designed to be safe enough and comfortable enough to carry people. We should follow the same principle in getting cargo and people to LEO.

    And we don't need to develop new techology to do this. We solved the problem of getting into and out of LEO 40 years ago.

    What we need is:

    1) A reliable heavy-lift booster that can orbit cargo to the ISS; I argue that we should go the expendable vehicle route because any attempt to design and build a reusable vehicle will add years and dollars chasing a dubious goal. Since the ISS is designed to accept cargo from the Shuttle's bay, I would create this new heavy-lift vehicle by launching the Shuttle without the Orbiter. NASA has had a heavy-lift vehicle within its reach for 25 years and refused to build it, chossing instead to unnecessarily put live at risk. (Meanwhile, we also have the new Delta and Atlas designs at our disposal. Their heavy-lift configurations are nothing to sneeze at.)

    2) Every effort to build a winged and resuable spacecraft has failed because it would have required technology that does not exist yet, or cannot be used without skyrocketing costs. The nascent Orbital Spaceplane will face the same problem. Let's shuffle this problem over to the advanced research department, and use technology that we know works to get humans into and out of LEO: capsules. Let's go the Apollo-derived route and get something flying ASAP.

  • The biggest advantage (Score:3, Informative)

    by Mr. Darl McBride ( 704524 ) * on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:12PM (#6881950)
    The biggest advantage, partly addressed in the article, is that you can send non-living cargo up with a much, much, much hotter burn. The shuttle could accelerate many times faster than it does if the G force for the humans inside weren't an issue.

    Experiments have been done with animals, accelerating them more quickly by suspending them in liquids and otherwise distributing the G forces, but the advances in this area of research have been slow and often times erratic. Monkeys have seemed fine after the research, only to show internal damage months or even years later.

    That the idea of pre-shipping cargo is being taken seriously is a very, very exciting thing!

  • Do one thing, do it well. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MightyTribble ( 126109 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:13PM (#6881959)
    It's smart to pick *one* requirement (like, say, get 4 people to and from orbit in the safest manner possible) and let that be the only criteria for equipment design.

    It may well be that we'll end up using simple rockets for this, like the Russians. Sure, it's not sexy, but I bet it'll be both cheaper than Shuttle and safer. Shuttle suffered from 'feature creep', from wacky Air Force 'cross-range' requirements and serious pork. Get rid of all that and NASA could build a safer crew vehicle.

    We'd then use the (not human-rated) big dumb boosters like Delta and Atlas to get cargo up. That, too, would be cheaper than Shuttle. Hrm. So, why do we have Shuttle again?
    • I'd rather see a people-mover that can evacuate a fully-crewed ISS (in addition to the initial flight crew getting the thing up there).

      Why we have the Shuttle: to get things out of orbit to work on them. The theory was that it would be cheaper to be able to bring things back down and fix or upgrade them, than to do the whole thing over from scratch. And that may be the case in certain circumstances, but I think if you take the total cost of the whole shebang, it's not been worth it.
      • My understanding is that NASA will build a 4-person crew vehicle that, when supplemented with a 3-seat soyuz, will provide full evacuation facilities for the ISS.

        But yeah, Shuttle was built based on some pretty wacked-out Air Force Cold War requirements (from 1970), one of which was the 'launch and retrieve satelites' (this was for spy satelites, before they got a handle on digitial imaging) and have something like continental cross-range ability so they could land anywhere in the US. Of course, by the tim

  • Re-usability seen as harmful (Score:4, Informative)

    by PCM2 ( 4486 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:14PM (#6881965) Homepage
    He also goes on about how a re-usable spacecraft may not be the most cost efficient vehicle.
    That's not how I read it. To me, it sounds like he's saying that any efforts by NASA to divert time/energy/know-how/budget into making things more re-usable as a way of cutting long term costs will only divert those resources from the effort to make the space program more safe. If we agree that, having had some really bad setbacks, safety is now the top priority, then it doesn't make sense to keep focusing on issues like re-usability. The exact quote:
    "Any other requirements, like reusability to reduce costs, the ability to also carry cargo, or additional functions besides crew transport, would eat into the vehicle's safety margin."
    • Exactly. It's a subtle way of saying that re-usable crew launch systems are a false economy.

      I bet if you worked out the cost of Shuttle launches (including captial expenditure, R & D, etc along with one-off mission costs) you'd get a figure approaching $1Bn per launch, for a little over 100 launches. And despite all that, we've still lost 40% of the fleet and two crews. Saturn V launches were less than that (I believe the figure was around $650m in 1999 dollars) and lifted about 2.5 times the cargo of

  • The shuttle is just barely reusable as-is. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by raygundan ( 16760 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:26PM (#6882060) Homepage
    Calling the shuttle reusable is specious at best. The thing requires a $500Million retrofit for EVERY SINGLE FLIGHT it makes. The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...

    It's a one-time use vehicle that we are spending unholy sums of money to fly repeatedly. A split system is a much better idea-- launch the people on a small but completely reliable people-mover, to catch up with a large-but-sloppy-and-cheap cargo hauling ship. Sure, you'll lose an occasional cargo ship-- but if you can make it enough cheaper, people can afford to rebuild and send their crap up twice for the same price as one trip today.

    • The tiles all have to be reglued, things have to be towed out of the ocean, etc...

      While your sentiment is correct (the orbiter is barely reusable), your details aren't. The orbiter loses tiles (I don't know exact numbers, but they're in the low hundreds at the very highest and most likely less than a hundred) every mission, but a small percentage compared to the thousands that are attached to the shuttle.

      What really makes a mockery of the "reusable" tag is the fact that the shuttle's main engines are

  • Of all the answers, maybe we are ready for the carbon-fiber tethered space elevator [about.com] to be built...
    Its just too bad it'll take a thousand centuries with current technology to manufacture the billion tons of carbon fiber needed manufacture the elevator... sigh... I was looking forward excitingly to the long ride to space, accompanied by a nice Muzak rendition of Michael Bolton's finest... hmmph...
  • I suggested this back in March [slashdot.org]
  • What will Fry do for a job????

  • A Learning Organization (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChuckDivine ( 221595 ) * <charles.j.divine@gmail.com> on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:46PM (#6882278) Homepage

    The quote at the beginning of the article

    (CNN) -- The lead investigator into the space shuttle Columbia accident told congressional leaders Thursday that his task force "determined NASA is not a learning organization. They do not learn from their mistakes."

    is damning for an organization that NASA is supposed to be.

    NASA should be a research and development organization. The job of such organizations is to learn new things and teach the rest of us. The fact that they're not learning from their mistakes shows an organization that's become mired in incompetence.

    This is one consequence of the rigid, hierarchical nature of today's NASA. Rigid hierarchies resist change and learning. They're great if you want to keep doing the same thing the same way. For instance, if you want to keep on making buggy whips in the same way to the same standards as your great grandfathers, adopt this kind of organization. Oh, you want to switch from buggy whip making to rocket research? Time to scrap the rigid hierarchy.

  • I know what the problem is... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by bravehamster ( 44836 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @02:51PM (#6882330) Homepage Journal
    Getting into outer space isn't that hard. The problem lies in designing ships and rockets that can get into outer space and _come back_. If we just leave out that last part, the design process becomes much easier and the costs much lower. All this concern over coming back down is just so much balderdash. I bet if you polled all the astronauts and would-be astronauts, the great majority would prefer to just stay out there. Just strap a big can on top of the rocket with some acceleration couches and you're all set.

  • ...not just an environmentalist mantra anymore.

    Now, the shuttle tried to reuse and the expense of reduction and recycling. Maybe this is another "pick any two" scenario... maybe not.

    At any rate, it would be interesting to see the situation analyzed in terms of an optimal balance between these 3 environmental goals.

    By not having astronauts on every mission, you REDUCE resources used. When you need to lanuch astronauts, you could continue to REUSE spacecraft. Heck, maybe now we will see some truly ex

  • Safety and Reusability (Score:3, Interesting)

    by mnmoore ( 50459 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @03:19PM (#6882546)
    Agreed, using the same vehicle for crew and cargo clearly compromises safety and capability for both.

    I'm a bit perturbed, though, by the idea that we should go back to launching crew in single-use vehicles a-la 1960. Sure, it would probably be safer than the shuttle, but (and I'm getting tired of hearing it) safety should not be NASA's primary goal. If you want safety, stay home already. Safety as an open-ended goal cannot be satisfied; it is both a money sink and a rhetorical ace-up-the-sleeve. Witness the current "safety from terrorism" efforts.

    Part of NASA's reason for being is to advance the state of the art for the public benefit; redeploying fourty year old technology won't do that. The purpose of the Mercury and Gemini projects were to make mistakes and learn from them, to eventually culminate in Apollo. The shuttle is the Mercury of reusable ships. Twenty-five years between technology generations is far too long. Let's learn from our mistakes and (with the cargo-carrying requirement dropped as a mistake) build the next generation shuttle already.

    Reusable crew vehicles are ultimately preferred, as they have greater inherent capacity for safety than single-use craft. Which flight of an airliner would you rather be on - its 1000th, or its very first?

    Launch the cargo on big dumb boosters but develop an elegant, safe way to get people to and from LEO .

  • Lost Luggage (Score:3, Funny)

    by No2NT ( 258831 ) on Friday September 05, 2003 @04:03PM (#6882962)
    It goes without saying, almost...

    "I'm sorry, you're luggage is on another flight!"

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