Space Shuttle Launch Delayed Until July 77
DarkNemesis618 writes "NASA decided on Tuesday to delay the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery until July, squashing all hopes that it would launch in May. The external fuel tank is again the culprit, but this time it's not the foam. One of the four fuel sensors in the fuel tank that control when the space shuttle's main engines cut off was discovered to be faulty. This delay does however, give NASA the time it needs to decide what to do about the small crack found on the robotic arm. Over a week ago, a worker bumped the arm leaving a small crack in it. The arm is key to this next mission as the cameras and lasers used to inspect the shuttle for damage are mounted on the robotic arm. All things aside, NASA engineers are saying that the next possible launch date will be July 1st."
This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:This is news? (Score:3)
With any luck NASA will be disbanded in the next decade.
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
I'm pretty sure no sane national politician wants to be associated with this clunker. Maybe if it brings jobs to his district.
I'm sure Bush'll give a nice speech if everything goes well and an even nicer one if it doesn't.
Most things worthwhile are also risky (Score:5, Insightful)
How many people died discovering the new world? How many died in WWII defending western democracy?
Somebody is going to put men on mars and the moon. Maybe it'll be China or Japan instead of the USA. Maybe it'll be Russia. If we are unwilling to accept the risk, then we will not share in the reward.
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
An ongoing rumor (Challenger/Reagan) for which no shred of evidence has ever been found
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
You state that as if it were a fact - please privide a reference or a cite.
Re:This is news? (Score:2, Insightful)
Why exactly do we need to get off of this rock, again? I mean, star trek is cool and everything, but until we're close to being able to teraform other planets, it's not going to be terribly useful to send people to live in space. The historical need for humans to be sent to different places in space has been the lack of ability to remote-control things because of time delays, but I guarentee you that AI
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
Please, don't insult me with your Star Trek comments.
There are TONS [direct.ca] of [thespacereview.com] resources [markelowitz.com] out there for the taking, resources that would make expensive technology inexpensive.
the problem is preventing us from turning earth into a rock. How about we focus on that instead of being in such a hurry to leave it.
Are you only capable of doing one thing in your life? I'm all for making things better here but don't act like we have to choose between the two.
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
I should add, however, that lunar resources are pretty dismal. Yes, there's helium 3, but helium itself is in ppm quantities on the moon and helium 3 a small fraction of the total lunar helium. Meanwhile, we don't even have a Dt-T fusion reactor let alone an He3 reactor, *And* we can
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Small scale mining missions would probably be cheaper with robots, yes - once the scale gets larger it becomes economically viable to have technicians on hand to fix things that go wrong. Once the scale gets larger still, it becomes viable to have entire colonies to do the mining.
We'
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
That is, unless you can reduce launch costs. Right now, you're balancing the cost of developing robotics to accomplish a given task with the cost of launching many tonnes of initial mass and several tonnes of annual resupply to keep humans alive, and there's no c
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Lets say 25k$/kg to the moon, initial setup overall is 30,000 kg, per person is 20,000 kg and annual resupply is 2,500kg. That wouldn't pay for any return trips, but lets pretend that they're convicts exported to the moon for life
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Also, even taking into account that most of your last sentence was an exag
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
The living space *does* need to be almost doubled, the life support systems need to be double capacity, etc. I was being extremely kind by my numbers (1 person = 50k kg, 2 people = 70k kg). I also left out some massive costs from that budget - for example, the development of a new heavy lift vehicle.
Overestimating the value of 1.2 billion dollars
In robotics, 1.2 billion dollars is an utter fortune. Any task a human might need to
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
You also need to factor in the cost of getting whatever you mine back to Earth. Chances are you'r
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
You mean the one that far worse for humans?
mars rovers
Much of that was launch cost. Most of the rest was scientific equipment development costs.
getting what you mine back to earth
The entire premise is just plain silly. There's nothing worth mining on the moon anyways, as I demonstrated way back in the thread without anyone contesting the basic point.
ignoring hydroponics
Ignoring that astronauts consume 3,000 calories per day, plants grow slowly, farms ar
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why go to a bar, or to a movie? It's not even remotely useful to do either since they do not provide a living.
Ever go skiing? Why go up a mountain just to take a huge risk balancing on narrow pieces of fibreglass while sliding down the side of a mountain at 60-90mph, when at any moment you might just fall and end up crashing into a tree and dying?
Why bother doing ANYTHING?
It's human nature. Why not explore? I would LOVE to see the gas giants up close - especially Jupiter and Saturn. I would love visit the Horsehead nebulae up close. I would love to visit the vicinity of a black hole just to find out whether it is actually visible or not. I would love to visit a brown dwarf to see just what happens while a star "dies."
Wouldn't it be fascinating? For no other reason than to SEE it. In person. Wonder in amazment at the universe.
We're human. We explore. We have curiousity. Of COURSE we want to get off this "rock" - does there have to be any reason other than "it's out there, and I have never been there." - to paraphrase from The Truman Show - "Because I never have! That's why people go places, isn't it?"
Does there HAVE to be a tangible result?
of course, I'd love to see an end to political strife, starvation, etc. first before spending money on space exploration, but again, it's all human nature and it's human nature to bicker and those issues will never be solved, so why not spend money on exploration?
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
If we blow our space budgets flying people around the cosmos with current launch prices, that's all we're doing: blowing our budgets. Better to put the money into tech research (and stick to cheapo robotic probes to satisfy our exploration needs for now) than to have a few select humans darting about space on economically unsustainable joyrides.
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
And it's this misguided view thats precisely why launch costs remain so expensive - that tech and money is the answer to everything. We have the technology. We've had the technology for forty years.
But the politics of the Space Race forced us down an evolutionary dead end.
Instead o
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Really? Fascinating! Explain to me the technology we have to produce CVD diamond panels for rentry shielding, and for more efficient carbon-carbon production. Explain to me the technology we have for alane rocket boosters and metastable helium. Explain to me the technology we have for scramjet engines. Explain to me the tech we have for gas/plasma injection during reentry. Explain to me the technology we have for MPD thrusters. Explain the technology we have for our nuclear ther
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Really? Fascinating! Explain to me the technology we have to produce CVD diamond panels for rentry shielding, and for more efficient carbon-carbon production. Explain to me the technology we have for alane rocket boosters and metastable helium. Explain to me the technology we have for scramjet engines. Explain to me the tech we have for gas/plasma injection during reentry. Explain to me the technology we have for MPD thrusters. Explain the technology we have for our nuclear thermal ro
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Yes, they did a good job at taking current tech and optimizing it (although I'd bet money that those prices won't stick; Delta IV heavy's and Ariane's didn't). They're still way too expensive, and you really can't go much further down than that with current tech unless A) the satellite market gets a tremendous boom far beyond anything we've seen in the past, j
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
That's just the point - we don't need any of those techologies. Not one.
Take heatshields for example - we don't some exotic material that may or may not work when it hits the real world. 'old fashioned' fiberglass and resin works just fine. What we need is to *automate the production of the heatshields*. Rather than designing them to the .9999 percentile, build bigger rockets s
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
So "fanboy" that multiple governments and governmental agencies worldwide decided to work on them.
That's just the point - we don't need any of those techologies. Not one.
Thanks for your psychic predictions of what will actually work out to produce cheap space access.
Take heatshields for example - we don't some exotic material that may or may not work when it hits the real world. 'old fashioned' fiberglass and resin works just fine.
Bzzzt. Fiberglass isn't even close
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
By that logic, why did you ever leave Mommy and Daddy to go out on your own (or have you yet)?
Space exploration doesn't have to be cowboy-style and risk human lives anymore, we have machines that can do that now (unlike the Apollo days when most of the motivation was to upstage the Soviets for PR value).
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:3, Interesting)
And how do you expect us to learn how to terraform other planets without going out there? For that matter, why do you think we need to terraform them? Space is full of resources just waiting to be exploited, but to do that, we're going to have to get out there because there's just so much you can do with robots and probes and it's jus
Re:This is news? (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe commercial space flight will do something to jump-start space exploration once more.
Re:This is news? (Score:3)
The shuttle program has many problems, but a lack of funding isn't one of them. From a recent post by Clark Lindsay's RLV News [hobbyspace.com]:
Re:Its Energy (Score:4, Informative)
Cute, but not quite. By far the biggest cost for the Space Shuttle is the standing army of around 10,000 people that's paid to work on the Shuttle, regardless of how often it's actually flying. The cost of the rocket fuel itself is less than one percent of the total launch cost.
Re:Its Energy (Score:2, Insightful)
The fuel may be a small account for the total cost, but the US is more focused on trying to secure oil, then explore space.
My point was until there is an immediate reason to be there for the good of the US, the govenrment isn't going to want to put any more money then is needed.
Re:Its Energy (Score:2)
Water is running out?! OMG!!?!? (Score:5, Informative)
The SRB's (the little white ones) use aluminium and ammonium perchlorate.
No oil there.
For manuevering the shuttle burns hydrazine and oxygen (there was a big fuss when Columbia crashed as hydrazine is pretty toxic)
Not gasoline, not even kerosene. Why is fighting over oil affecting then again?
Re:Water is running out?! OMG!!?!? (Score:2)
Deploy nitpickers:
Just about every industrial chemical process we use consume hydrocarbons, which of course the US consumes far in excess of its own production. The depressing thing is that people assume that moving away from buring fossil fuels in the thing they own (a c
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
A private, commercial space program is predicated on profit. It may be a bit slow starting, but if properly run, it makes back more than the money it invests. The next time, it can go further. There is no theoretical ceiling on the funding of a for-profit space program, so long as it continues turning a
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
And it'll be up to the people paying for rides on those rockets whether or not that's a risk they want to take, much like they decide if getting in an automobile is worth the risk. Regrettably, it's also possible that a well-publicized accident early on might result in congressmen pushing for legislation to protect people from their own decision
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Space travel is bloody dangerous, plain and simple.
Lets look at it a different way. What caused the delay? A fuel sensor. One of *four*. You only need one working fuel sensor to measure your fuel levels. Sounds like being extremely overcautious, doesn't it? Well, it might until you think of the fact that there are hundreds
Re:This is news? (Score:4, Insightful)
You should be careful about presuming the underlying conditions will remain to give you a sustainable result. You have to realize your worldview is based on a life experience in the US, which has experienced a vast amount of economic wealth since the 1950's, and has been pissing it away ever since. Its like living off your credit card, presuming you'll eventually get a higher paying job to pay off the debts. The world doesn't work like that, and that experience is almost a chapter in history.
There is no future higher paying job (unless you're in the health care industry). The US has abandoned its industrial base, the industries it had an economic advantage in, and is so f*cking up its high tech industries and education, it will not even have that as a growth industry. You have a brain that can find a cure for AIDS or the next technological marvel? Fine, you have a future. Everyone else will be a form of wage slave or white collar con-man.
NASA & the Apollo space programs existed for two reasons. 1) The US was so ridiculously rich, it wanted to piss away tax dollars to aerospace companies. 2) The US was in a military competition and wanted to divert dollars to military-industrial complex without calling it weapons. There may be a new boom in space exploration, but it won't be led by the US. It will be too financially broken from its non-critical military adventurism. And if the gov't is bankrupt, be sure there will not be lots of new millionaires to take up the space exploration spending slack.
Already, only one third of our US budget is deemed "discretionary" spending. That means if we nuked every social welfare program, education subsidy, stopped all subsidized construction, opened our border to illegals and terrorists, allowed interstate crime to go unchecked, disbanded the military, we would only be able to reduce the total tax burden by a third. The IRS would still have to collect taxes for everything that doesn't enhance our lives, which is interest on treasury debt, and financial obligations, like federal pensions and social security. This is what's called maxing out your credit card; now live like a debt slave. Sure, the US can declare bankruptcy, its called hyperinflation. The rest of the world we owe money to will not take kindly to that. It will be a world wide depression (recession, if the rest of the world is lucky), and we will experience starvation and loss of material wealth (like housing, cars, entertainment devices). No more highspeed Internet or Slashdot, you won't be able to afford it.
Right now, the Treasury secretary is begging the Congress to raise the debt ceiling, i.e. borrow more money that its currently allowed to by law. If the Congress does not, the gov't will experience chapter 11-like bankruptcy situation; we won't have enough cash to pay currently due bills. Of course, the Congress could choose to just shutdown gov't programs and make the US live within its means. No, we're going to hit the credit card harder this year. You see this crisis on the TV or papers? Nope, stay clueless and happy, mushroom.
It may not even be able to do that. Bush cronies, for years, has been looking for ways to loot NASA's science budget (which barely cracks a few billion). But if they kill all space probe exploration, there will be quite a stink. (They're not killing manned programs, because it already helps their buds, like DeLay.) So, what does Bush do? He announces a NEW program to put man back on the moon and to Mars. Forget the fact the US does not have that kind of discretionary spending, like it did in the 1960's. Of course it costs more than probes. So, we take money away from exploring asteroids and Plu
Re:This is news? (Score:2)
Re:This is news? (Score:1)
Justifying thier existance (Score:2, Interesting)
Launch pushed back? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Launch pushed back? (Score:1)
I hope they've at least considered using duck tape for the robotic arm.
the point? (Score:1)
Re:the point? (Score:1)
Re:the point? (Score:1)
Re:the point? (Score:1)
The point I made about it still taking off on top of giant rockets was my attempt at being silly(how else is it going to aquire enough energy to orbit the planet with te
the point? (Score:2)
it also occurs to me that i have a really funny picture somewhere of a probe that was supposed to decelerate via parachutes and the photo is of it halfway into the dirt in the desert. 'cause the chute was mis-implemented.
eric
Re:the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
Do you have examples? I'm under the impression that the cargo retrieval capability was only used once or twice in the Space Shuttle's history, although the Air Force fantasized that they would use it to do things like snatch Soviet satellites out of the sky.
Re:the point? (Score:2)
The point of having it land like an airplane is that it's a controlled landing rather than dropping into the ocean as Mercury, Gemini and Apollo did. The shuttle lands where we want it to, at an airport or airbase, instead of needing to be picked up by helicopter and transported by ship. Not only that, it's bigger than would be pract
Re:the point? (Score:1)
Re:the point? (Score:3, Interesting)
To retrieve Soviet satellites... among other things. So you are right. Prettymuch pointless now. Which is why the CEV removes this requirement.
Galileo and preemptive management (Score:3, Insightful)
All that said, I hope such preemptive management could be used for NASA's projects. The circumstances are quite different (you know, the budget cuts...), but it's never bad to have a Plan B.
Re:Galileo and preemptive management (Score:2)
That's not preemptive managment - it's spin control. GIOVE-A is the backup bird, GIOVE-B is the 'full meal deal'. What
Re:Galileo and preemptive management (Score:2)
Re:Galileo and preemptive management (Score:2)
Do you happen to have a source for this? I think I'd like to add the information to the wikipedia article on GIOVE [wikipedia.org].
A modest suggestion (Score:5, Insightful)
JB Weld
Re:A modest suggestion (RE:AC) its not NASA... (Score:2)
The robotic arm wasn't designed by NASA... it is Canadian (the so-called "Canada Arm")
Re:A modest suggestion (Score:4, Insightful)
Mods- if you have any sense at all, make the parent +1 DUMBASS, then make this post +1 Troll pickler. Let folks read it and judge for themselvs. Yes, I'm going to unload on the fucker. And I'm going to say FUCK! Repeatedly! I might even misspeel. My nomex briefs are on...
I wonder what they mean by "bump"?
Lets start out with an article from a real space news site: http://spaceflightnow.com/news/n0603/08shuttle/ [spaceflightnow.com]
Go read that, or at least the first sentance. Then think about it for a bit. I quote:
The shuttle Discovery's robot arm is undergoing ultrasound inspections after a weekend mishap in which a moveable access bucket bumped into the arm during work to clean up broken glass.
As in the dipshits at KSC were working to clean up broken glass from a busted heat lamp, and rammed the fucker with a movable man holding bucket. I'll bet that would even put a nice sized ding in your beat to hell dumbass driver's Ford pinto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Pinto/ [wikipedia.org]. Probably not a quarter million dollar ding, though. And they wouldn't likely need to spend a quarter mill worth of analysis to figure out what if anything to do to fix your pinto. Hell, I'd offer to fix your ride by gluing old bubble gum onto the side of your shitbucket with stale ass chaff- for free.
That arm is a piece of shit if you ask me. Like a lot of stuff designed at NASA (some is very good don't get me wrong) it's designed to work within insanely too small a tolerence.
Stick to something besides pretending to intelligently critique space hardware design.
See, an item like the arm doesn't just need to be precise (as you muttle on about), but also a few other things that go along with space flight hardware:
+ Strong (its a flying crane and can handle 65,000 pounds on orbit.)
+ Clean. As in contiminate free so that it doesn't fuck up things that fly inside the shuttle.
+ Lightweight. As in every pound that the arm packs up is an pound of cargo you can't fly (at ~$12k to $30K per pound).
+ TVAC compatible. As in it lives in space. Insane heat, vacum, cold... Nasty stuff. Also, cant outgass or warp in space.
+ Shirtsleeve compatible. As in lives inside the VAB and landing sites and everywhere the shuttle goes on earth.
+ Highly instrumented.
+ Accurate. (look that one up, it is different than precise)
+ Gentle. (can't damage the hardware while schlepping it around)
+ Reliable as all hell(as in who thefuck fixes it if it breaks on orbit)
+ Able to carry the OBSS: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_Boom_Sensor_S ystem/ [wikipedia.org]
+ Documented to all bloody hell. As in the QA bastards can probably tell you what mine hauled up the metal in the wire that runs down the arm next to the bump, what miner brought it up, on what shift, using which truck, and so on and so on... For every component, again for every subassembly, again for every next level assembly. Oh, and the entire build, test, rework, and flight history of everything associated with the SRMS. Go look up heritage, in the space flight context.
The world is not a static place and the unexpected can happen, don't design a frigging billion dollar robotic arm that breaks if you touch it. I can't even count how many times those arms have broken.
Really? You must be mistaking the SRMS with that pinto that you drive!
Do you want to try and tell the world how many times the SRMS has broken on orbit?
disclaimers: Yes, homer, I do work in the aerospace business. No, I don't work for the fine cannucks that build the SRMS. Yes, I think that
Let's hope they avoid... (Score:1)
"There's gonna be fireworks...on the 4th of July. .
Scrap the shuttle already. It's better at killing astronauts than doing manned science in space.
Wow... (Score:3, Funny)
That's got to be one Hell of a bump! I mean, what's that thing made of? Is it a Chihuly?
Scrap it Now (Score:3, Funny)
That goddamn sensor (Score:2, Informative)
These sensors have been unreliable since the beginning of the program. Notice that the article said there were four sensors? They are redundant, because th
Outsource it to Norway (Score:2)
launch date clarification (Score:2)
So July 1st is the FIRST opportunity to launch, but may not necessarily be THE day that it does launch