Astronauts Face Bleak Odds For Spaceflight 359
Abhishek writes "According to a Space.com report, Astronauts at NASA fear that they won't be able to fly until 2015 and that, for some, would be too late. The space shuttles that NASA have are almost at the end of their lifetimes and any shuttle can take years to be built. Though almost everybody is involved in some way or another in looking after a shuttle, only a lucky few actually gets the chance for a ride."
Begs the question... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Begs the question... (Score:2, Funny)
While waiting for specific mission assignments... (Score:2, Informative)
They help with planning and ground support for other missions, help with long-term planning, and serve other tasks often depending on their pre-astronaut background.
Currently, there are some working on the Crew Exploration Vehicle and Moon/Mars plans.
Re:Begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
Most of them have other jobs at NASA when not in prep for a flight, such as running a lab, program manager for a particular system, performing various analyses or engineering work, etc., plus all the PR (trips to schools, educational programs). Basically their technical/leaderhship skills are used within the program.
Well, if they want to go into space they can always take one of the new private rides which will probably get them there faster than 2015, though not for as long a stay.
Re:Begs the question... (Score:2)
Re:Begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
Getting into space is more complex than flying an airplane up to 63 miles and jumping out. To go into orbit you need to achieve a speed of about Mach 25 (Spaceship 1 was nowhere even close to orbital velocity). Rocket technologies today make sense in accomplishing this by minimizing the weight of the spacecraft and maximizing the weight of the fuel. To do what you want would require that almost all of the fuel and useful spacecraft are carried in an aircraft to perhaps 100,000 feet. The fuel to do so would be enormous and you would still have to fire the rocket to get the other Mach 24 or so. The complex airoframe required to pull this off would probably require a significantly larger amount of fuel that is used today. The losses a rocket has from atmospheric drag at high velocities (up to about 100,000 feet to be equivalent) would be vastly smaller than the fuel required to launch a standard airplane assisted rocket launch.
On a side note, a scramjet may be useful in the future due to its small engine size (extremely few parts). In this scenario a rocket would launch from the ground up to Mach 1, the scramjet would accelerate up to Mach 15, and then another rocket would accelarate up to Mach 25 for orbit or escape. Considering that no space launch has ever used a scramjet, I don't think its fair to call existing technologies 'dumb'. But then again, when has anyone considered 'rocket scientist' to be a synonymn for 'intelligent engineer'?
Re:Begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
What the parent needs to realize is how tough it is to scale up rockets to orbital, because you have to invest more and more of your energy into accelerating your fuel. It is quite possible, in theory, to get a moderate cargo to orbit from air launch (tow-launch, drop-launch, or carry-launch) if you use very high ISP engines and a very low mass craft. However, if you don't, your ability to just drop from an aircraft quickly becomes untenable; even a Cossack couldn't carry, say, a scaled-up SpaceShipOne.
The real benefit from air launch, BTW, is not the altitude, but the fact that you don't have to plow through the atmosphere as much and don't have the problems associated with having your engines firing right near the ground (which is more likely to damage them). And ramjets would be great; unfortunately, we cancelled the program because of the premature Mars mission spending
Re:Begs the question... (Score:3, Informative)
Err... no. The program was cancelled because scramjets are useless for launching cargo into orbit. The problem is, as you pointed out earlier in your post, the majority of the energy you need to get to orbit is in the "horizontal" direction. Most orbital flight profiles expend only 10% of energy getting into space and 90% gathering enough speed for orbit.
What that means, in practical terms
Re:Begs the question... (Score:4, Funny)
I can just imagine it...
little kid; "Are you really an astronaut, mister?"
nasa astronaut; "yeah, son, thats right" (gleaming smile)
little kid; "how many times have you been in space mister?"
nasa astronaut; "well, I havn't actually been *in* space, but we train for it all of the time!"
little kid; "ummm when *are* you going into space then, mister?"
nasa astronaut; "I'm unlikely ever to go into space, son"
little kid; "so how come you are an astronaut?"
Re:Begs the question... (Score:3, Funny)
nasa astronaut; "I'm unlikely ever to go into space, son"
little kid; "so how come you are an astronaut?"
NASA astronaut: "Why, you little ...!"
Little kid: (choking)
zRe:Begs the question... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Begs the question... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Begs the question... (Score:4, Insightful)
These are highly trained and educated individuals, I am sure they being employed gainfully...
Re:Begs the question... (Score:5, Informative)
That is begging the question. ;)
2 jobs (Score:5, Informative)
Excerpt from RedNova [rednova.com]
Re:Begs the question... (Score:2)
Well... they are more likely to make it to planet caravan with some dank nug and Sabbath than to make it to Mars with NASA
Re:Begs the question... (Score:2)
math genius (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, wait, did it save you money? Let's look at this... $600,000,000 to launch (I'll take your number because I'm too lazy to look it up). There are about 100,000,000 taxpayers in this country, so assuming two launches per year, you have saved yourself $12/year. Go buy that new car you've been lusting over with that. 12 fucking dollars, man, and you are bitching! Maybe buying two subs from Subway is more important than a bunch of scientific research, but we won't debate that. The annual budget of NASA is 16 billion, which comes out to $160/year/taxpayer for EVERYTHING they do (satellites, mars missions, aerodynamics research, plasma physics, etc). The WEEKLY budget of the Iraq war is 5 billion, and that is just the Iraq war not all of the defense dept.
Even if you'd rather save the $12/year to not launch, did you even think what it costs to research the failure and fix the issues? The return to flight costs were around 1.2 billion (that included all the research into the accident and all the new testing and procedure development). They haven't launched in two years and only had three launches planned in that time, so you saved all of $3/year. Woooooo!
And astronauts have real jobs when they aren't flying. Some are doctors, some are plasma physicists, some are just normal engineers doing research. They aren't always training for a new mission; they are using their single paycheck to do a normal engineering job until it is time to train and fly.
Re:math genius (Score:5, Insightful)
Course, what if I give you your $10 bucks for space jaunting, are you going to give me my $10 to research a cure for MS or Lupus, or are you going to start raging about liberals and their damn tax and spend ways?
Voting with Tax Dollars (Score:5, Interesting)
I imagined that there would be a lot of boring, yet essential for a smoothly running country, items that would be almost ignored under such a system.
Re:math genius (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course, "businesses" don't pay taxes, only people do. Corporate taxes must necessarily be paid by some combination of increased prices to consumers, decreased wages to employees, or lower returns to shareholders.
What really sucks... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What really sucks... (Score:2)
Re:What really sucks... (Score:5, Funny)
Passenger: No! Where the hell's that beer I ordered???
Neil Armstrong: It won't be a minute, sir. I just need to make one giant leap to reach the cupboard where the beers are.
Re:What really sucks... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, then there hasn't been a need ever, if that's how you look at it. But try this instead: these are some of the smartest, most physically and intellectually hardy, well-rounded people on the planet. Every one of them is better equipped to teach than most teachers, better able to fly than most pilots, better able to handle stress than most soldiers/firefighters/police, better able to understand and work with complex systems than most engineers... somehow I think that someone with those skills is hardly going to be working at, well, Disney's Space Mountain ride. There are plenty of systems engineers I know making six figures that would love to have one of these folks as a boss. Just the aerospace defense area alone could gobble up the entire astronaut-trained team in any one month's hiring cycle.
Now... does holding analysis review meetings quite measure up to flying to the moon? No. Does grading orbital mechanics term papers have quite the same panache as shrieking into LEO with a billion dollar payload? No. Is my job boring? Most of the time. They'll deal with it just fine.
Re:What really sucks... (Score:2)
They could get jobs at Space Camp, you know, inspire kids to reach for the stars and end up like themselves...
Re:What really sucks... (Score:2, Funny)
India and China are expanding their space program. Maybe they can become visa astronauts (B1H?). With all the damned visa workers India sends over here, at least give our astronauts some reciprical opportunities.
Useful contact info (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Useful contact info (Score:2)
Re:NASA does things "rigorously" (Score:2)
Re:Useful contact info (Score:5, Insightful)
If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:5, Insightful)
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:2)
FYI. NASA's proposed 2006 Budget Request is just $18 Billion and change.
But in defense of NASA, only $10.3 Billion is to be spent on exploration and operations.
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:5, Insightful)
As an example of how much research NASA does, just take a look at how many papers there are on NASA's site that just contain the word "novel" [google.com].
Rutan doesn't do research. He doesn't have the budget for it. His budget was about right for what he did: a completely unscalable joyride craft [daughtersoftiresias.org].
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:5, Insightful)
> Rutan researched
He did not research. He *developed*. You need to learn what research is. Rutan took already existing technology (much of which had its fundamentals laid out by NASA research), designed a craft, and built it. For comparison, I don't call it "research" when I write a program that utilizes Blowfish encryption; developing Blowfish encryption was the "research".
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:If Rutan had NASA's budget (Score:3, Insightful)
In the spaceship Vostok 1, Senior Lieutenant Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin orbited earth one time at an altitude of 187 3/4 miles (302 kilometers) for 108 minutes at 18,000 miles an hour
Spaceship one went to 100 kilometers, for 2 minutes? and went maybe a few hundred miles/hour. In other words not even close. NASA didn't do it, because theres no point.
Is it a vital first step in a private space program, yes.
Is it important to the worlds space program, no.
Re:Useful contact info (Score:2)
11m$ launch cost in 1994 dollars (~14m$ in modern dollars), 375kg payload = 37k$/kg.
I don't know why people around here just assume that Scaled can magically make everything cheaper and safer with space, when no space agency in the world and no private contractor has been able to. It's not like
Re:Useful contact info (Score:2)
yes cool stuff rutan's made... but if you want to get on the orbit on the cheap reliably better call up the russians(hell, why not just buy the whole russian space program).
hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Informative)
Re:hmm (Score:5, Insightful)
Why not? Current commies (China) make almost all our clothes, our toys, our machines....
Re:hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Maybe NASA should be made to concentrate on basic engineering rather than fancy shuttles.
Re:hmm (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:hmm (Score:3, Informative)
What do you call an astronaut who won't fly? (Score:5, Interesting)
OK, more seriously, I think the era of NASA is in decline and the era of private spacecraft is in ascent. Some of those astronauts may yet fly, but they might have to retire from NASA to do it.
Re:What do you call an astronaut who won't fly? (Score:3, Informative)
Uh, first, we have to have private spacecraft. Burt Rutan's project is about at the level of the second Mercury flight, which was suborbital.
Re:What do you call an astronaut who won't fly? (Score:2)
Re:What do you call an astronaut who won't fly? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention 40 years in the past.
The private sector still has a lot of work to do before it can really play with the big boys (in this case, government space agencies). It will catch up, but it's kinda like saying you're ready to start carrying passengers between New York and Tokyo because you can fold a piece of paper and make it fly. You may have re-discovere
Don't quit your day job... (Score:2)
Then insurance costs alone will bust 'em.
Need to hurry up and get back out there (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Need to hurry up and get back out there (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the 70's, NASA's budget has not been the top issue (it has gone down steadily since we stopped going to the moon.) And we also no longer wanted to beat the Soviets in space (since we already did that.)
We still have the technology to go to the moon, and I would even hazard to guess the technology is there to go to Mars as well, but the money is not there.
And the testing money NASA is spending, well think about that as trying to get itself to Mars on a limited budget. If something will not work to accomplish NASA's probable main mission, why stick with it?
NASA has accomplished several smaller probe missions. But the fact is, that with such a smaller budget and the fact that we are still the main financier's for the international space station; NASA has issues with its budget right now. So, write to your congressman if you want to go out to Mars or goto the moon again, because right now its those people who decide whether we go or not. (Think oversight committee as well.)
Not only a money issue... (Score:3)
I would argue to you that we have no WILL to go back to the Moon...or Mars...or anywhere else that requires putting men any farther than low orbit.
We know that no one else is likely going to another planet soon, so we go "What's the rush? Why spend the money now? It's not like anyone else is going". Doing it for science, and frankly, for history and a
Re:Need to hurry up and get back out there (Score:2)
Yes. We've lost 3 entire crews and risked the lives of others. Apparently, the missions do not justify the risks involved nowadays. NASA cannot afford to make another mistake so the costs can only go up while paranoid security measures and fear of doing something wrong make it harder to send anyone into space.
Besides, Joe Sixpack is entertained enough with the unmanned missions and the high-res pictures they send back. So why should the well-paid peopl
private sector (Score:3, Insightful)
Nasa is defunct and crippled, if it were a pet we'd put it out of its misery!
Blast! (Score:2)
Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is there some reason not to have human feelings? (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a much bigger fanboy for robotic space exploration, and not much of an advocate of the shuttle program. (Nixon basically pimped the shuttle by exaggerating how cost effective it could be, in a spectacular example of how much government largesse the 'Publicans are capable of when the military industrial complex stands to benefit. IMHO, of course.) That doesn't keep me from sympathizing with astronauts who are, by all accounts, pretty impressive people.
Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a weakness.
Re:Are we supposed to feel sorry for them? (Score:2)
Wow, only a few ever get to ride? (Score:2)
Is it REALLY part of the story that only a blessed few get to ride in the shuttle?
Work Wanted (Score:2, Interesting)
So? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So? (Score:3, Insightful)
What were they thinking? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
stupid management yes, mostly just about being shortsighted because of not having money. they've had dozens of plans for a replacement, but without budget to order one they remain as concepts.
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:3, Insightful)
The X-33/Venturestar program is a poster-child f
Re:What were they thinking? (Score:3, Interesting)
Launching: NASA Virgins (Score:4, Insightful)
sell space station on eBay (Score:5, Funny)
Why does this make me want to cry instead of laugh?
Re:sell space station on eBay (Score:2)
Why is space flight so difficult politically? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why is that?
The first shuttle was built in the 70s using decades old know-how. Why has it taken so long to produce its successor?
Is it the technological challenge, or is it just politics that keeps the manned space exploration down?
Pentagon procurement (Score:2)
This is how the procurement works, and no doubt the new craft will have some "anti-terrorism" purpose as well (to get extra budget).
a) We could just go for a low cost solution that does the job, like the russians
b) But this would mean that we couldn't give large subsidies to the R&D programmes at folks like Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
c) And it might not even be more expensive than what those pesky Europeans are doing with Ariane.
So the end result is a massive white elephant of a programme that aims
steps of plan. (Score:3, Insightful)
2. buy Soyuz rockets from the Russians
3. invest the billions you save out on other projects like lunar colonies, exploration drones and advanced propulsion systems.
why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Just order the same parts, new, and put them all together.
Re:why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:5, Insightful)
b) Much of the cost of building something like this is figuring how to build the parts to spec, and chances are, they don't have the tooling in place anymore
c) The only thing the current shuttles have problem is that it is too complex and too costly to send on missions.
While politically impossible, it would be far cheaper to buy launches from the Russians to put these guys into space.
Re:why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have heard this argument time and again - we can't make the parts anymore, we don't know how. I am waving the BS flag on that. I challenge you, or anyone else, to point to a part used on the Saturn V rockets that can no longer be made. I am not saying that it can be made inexpensively or mass produced in a factory, but point to something that absolutley cannot be made.
Also, do you need something made to spec? What size? I'll measure it with my laser. Need to examine it for flaws? I can use my PC and a camera to look it over for you. Need an X-Ray of it? I can do the same thing. Need to check calculations? Forget your slide rule, I've got a TI-92.
In short, I doubt there is anything technologically impossible about creating more Saturn V rockets. I doubt there is even a financial reason it can't be done - NASA declaring they are spending billions to buy a new "fleet" of Saturn V rockets will motivate companies to produce what is needed for a reasonable cost (in most cases). What we really need is the political will to say this is important and we need to fund it.
No bucks, no Buck Rogers.
Re:why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Could we duplicate a 1972 Pinto? Not a look alike, with a better motor and suspension, but an actual duplicate 1972 Pinto. Sure. But at a cost of 5x the original. Finding that 5x is the problem.
Re:why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:why don't they build a couple more copies? (Score:2, Interesting)
(because it's inefficient,;), unsophisticated, unsecure and uneconomic. Even spare parts are rare
(remember the NASA's search for used i8086 and i8088...).
Not that easy. (Score:2)
A lot of the original tooling is probably gone. And each one is more or less a custom job, not an assembly line duplicate.
postponed from fatal events that occurred? (Score:2, Insightful)
1 February 2003; Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107), over northeast Texas: Columbia was in the re-entry phase of flight after a 16-day mission and its intended destination was the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Communications with the shuttle were lost at about 9 a.m. local time. At the time of the most catastrophic phase of the breakup, the spacecraft was at an a
And to think when I was a kid... (Score:5, Funny)
Just the American ones? (Score:2, Interesting)
almost at the end of their lifetimes... = false (Score:2, Insightful)
This isn't quite right. The remaining shuttle fleet isn't even to the halfway point of its life expectancy. In other words, the flight-hours remaining on the airframe is greater than 50%.
Yes, we could use a more advanced vehicle, with less risk and more efficiency. But let's not go spreading rumors - the shuttle fleet is actually not old, the design is.
kulakovich
Private Companies (Score:5, Interesting)
What happened? (Score:3, Funny)
( there go my karma points )
If they can't get to space through NASA... (Score:2)
Definition of an astronaut? (Score:3, Informative)
" a person who travels beyond the earth's atmosphere; also : a trainee for spaceflight"
Gotta suck when you tell people you're an astronaut and people's first question is "When did you go up?". They probably have the Websters definition loophole printed on the back of their business cards.
Nah. They just use the old line... (Score:2)
man... (Score:3, Funny)
e.
Too many astronauts (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead, we got the worst of both words: A launch schedule in which four shuttles did at most a dozen launches a year together, little likelihood of even that annual figure in the three remaining shuttles' lifetimes, and an astronaut corps that numbers in the hundreds with new inductees coming in every two years. That's just crazy.
To paraphrase Jurassic Park (Score:4, Insightful)
"I hate that man..."
The "Excess Eleven" (Score:5, Interesting)
One wrote a book, "The Making of an Ex-Astronaut".
Re:The "Excess Eleven" (Score:4, Informative)
"Most of those guys quit or were laid off in the early 1970s."
From the article:
"Seven stayed on through the 1970's and finally got to fly aboard the space shuttle."
In reality most stayed on and actually got to fly.
Nuclear Rockets? (Score:5, Interesting)
Right place, right time (Score:3, Informative)
Everyone in the Astronaut training program is looking for their chance to jump the line and get wings, and you never know how might turn out to be the one to flip the critical switch for SCE to AUX and save the mission.
Bean later flew in space again as a Commander on the Apollo Applications mission that became Skylab.
Re:Lucky? (Score:2, Insightful)
I know that comment was supposed to be a crass and cynical joke. However, given we all are going to die anyway; who is luckier someone who just dies, or someone who dies while working towards a goal they believe is worthwhile?
Re:Lucky? (Score:2)
You bet your ass the two dead crews would consider themselves lucky. They died doing something they loved.