Shuttle Statistics...?

Hi,

Mainly out of curiosity, I was trying to put together some statistics (per
Orbiter) with the shuttles...

After every touchdown, you always hear how many million miles was flown
during that particular mission.

Thought it would be interesting to add the total number of miles each
Orbiter has flown. (Not taking any major upgrades or anything into account,
simply the total number each one has flown under the name "Atlantis",
"Discovery", "Columbia", "Challenger", etc.)

Attempted to add the numbers up, from NASA's own websites, but even their
numbers are full of holes.

With the total miles, it would be interesting to calculate how many "light
minutes" each has flown. Has any of them flown 1 AU yet?

Total number of astronauts flown on the shuttles combined? If you were
putting together a shuttle astronaut re-union, and they were all coming to
NY to be flown elsewhere for the re-union, how many 757-300's (with 280
seats) would you have to charter?

"Eric" wrote in message
news
Hi,

Mainly out of curiosity, I was trying to put together some statistics (per
Orbiter) with the shuttles...

Google around much of this has been done.



After every touchdown, you always hear how many million miles was flown
during that particular mission.

Thought it would be interesting to add the total number of miles each
Orbiter has flown. (Not taking any major upgrades or anything into
account,
simply the total number each one has flown under the name "Atlantis",
"Discovery", "Columbia", "Challenger", etc.)

Attempted to add the numbers up, from NASA's own websites, but even their
numbers are full of holes.

With the total miles, it would be interesting to calculate how many "light
minutes" each has flown. Has any of them flown 1 AU yet?

Well quick BOTE...

Orbit: roughly 25,000 miles. 18 a day.

So that's 450,000 miles per day.

Or roughly 3,150,000 miles a week.

Average flight as I recall is about a week.

So, speed of light is roughly: 186,000 miles a second.

So roughly 17 "lightseconds" per flight.

Multiply over 113 flights that's roughly 32 minutes.

At roughly 93 million miles, 30 flights is roughly 1 AU.

Which if we do the math, that's roughly 3.76 AUs.

Times roughly 8 minutes, which gives 30+ minutes, so our numbers are in the
ballpark.
(rounding errors, assumptions etc.)



Total number of astronauts flown on the shuttles combined? If you were
putting together a shuttle astronaut re-union, and they were all coming to
NY to be flown elsewhere for the re-union, how many 757-300's (with 280
seats) would you have to charter?

2.

This is a bit harder. Average crew of 7*113 gives 791 astronauts.

But many are reflights. A few have flown up to 5-7 times.

So figure a rough ball park would be less than 1/2 that.

Again, there are numbers out there.

Dennis Jenkins has a great book up through the first 100 missions, but
that's obviously incomplete.

He'll have a new one out "in the future" (as I recally most likely when the
program finally ends).

"Eric" wrote in message
news
Hi,

Mainly out of curiosity, I was trying to put together some statistics (per
Orbiter) with the shuttles...

After every touchdown, you always hear how many million miles was flown
during that particular mission.

Thought it would be interesting to add the total number of miles each
Orbiter has flown. (Not taking any major upgrades or anything into
account,
simply the total number each one has flown under the name "Atlantis",
"Discovery", "Columbia", "Challenger", etc.)

Some info in the table at the bottom of this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle

Summary of miles flown by each orbiter as of August 2005:

Atlantis: 89,908,732
Challenger: 25,803,940
Columbia: 125,204,911
Discovery: 104,510,673
Endeavour: 85,072,07

-- Joe D.

"Joe D." wrote in message
. ..
Some info in the table at the bottom of this article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle

Summary of miles flown by each orbiter as of August 2005:

Atlantis: 89,908,732
Challenger: 25,803,940
Columbia: 125,204,911
Discovery: 104,510,673
Endeavour: 85,072,07

-- Joe D.

Sheesh, how'd I miss Wikipedia.. ? :-)

Don't see any sources cited for those numbers, but I'll go with them.

Wow, more miles than I thought. Columbia and Discovery have already "been
to the sun", while Atlantis and Endeavor are right on the heels.

Total "light minute" time of all vehicles combined: 38 1/2 minutes...

Thanks!

"Greg D. Moore (Strider)" wrote in message

Well quick BOTE...

Orbit: roughly 25,000 miles. 18 a day.

So that's 450,000 miles per day.

Or roughly 3,150,000 miles a week.

Average flight as I recall is about a week.

So, speed of light is roughly: 186,000 miles a second.

So roughly 17 "lightseconds" per flight.

Multiply over 113 flights that's roughly 32 minutes.

At roughly 93 million miles, 30 flights is roughly 1 AU.

Which if we do the math, that's roughly 3.76 AUs.

Times roughly 8 minutes, which gives 30+ minutes, so our numbers are in
the
ballpark.
(rounding errors, assumptions etc.)

Yeah, I was guestimating using a similiar approach and had similiar numbers.
Yours is probably more accurate, using "flight days" though.

Just looked at the wiki article. Don't know their reference, but pretty
cool. They've tacked on much more miles than I thought!

Cheers,
Eric

Going by "average number of miles" to the sun, of course. Not trying to be
overly-technical, just using the average 93M miles bit.

Cheers,
Eric

On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 01:07:59 GMT, "Eric" wrote:

Going by "average number of miles" to the sun, of course. Not trying to be
overly-technical, just using the average 93M miles bit.

Of course, flying to the sun is a bad idea. Unless you do as Brezhnev
suggested, and go at night

Dale

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 01:43:48 GMT, "Eric" wrote:

Hi,

Mainly out of curiosity, I was trying to put together some statistics (per
Orbiter) with the shuttles...

After every touchdown, you always hear how many million miles was flown
during that particular mission.

Thought it would be interesting to add the total number of miles each
Orbiter has flown. (Not taking any major upgrades or anything into account,
simply the total number each one has flown under the name "Atlantis",
"Discovery", "Columbia", "Challenger", etc.)

Attempted to add the numbers up, from NASA's own websites, but even their
numbers are full of holes.

With the total miles, it would be interesting to calculate how many "light
minutes" each has flown. Has any of them flown 1 AU yet?

Total number of astronauts flown on the shuttles combined? If you were
putting together a shuttle astronaut re-union, and they were all coming to
NY to be flown elsewhere for the re-union, how many 757-300's (with 280
seats) would you have to charter?




After STS-107 I created a spreadsheet with Shuttle flight data.
I have not updated it since then, but you can download it
and add STS-114 data.

To download the shuttle spreadsheet:

Go to my Geocities Redstone missile Links page:
http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/links.htm

The first link is the shuttle spreadsheet.
Just right click on "Space Shuttle Spreadsheet" and save it.

http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/shuttle.xls

These stats come from the Kennedy Space Center
Shuttle Mission Index webpages:

http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/.../missions.html

If the data is not on the KSC pages, then it came from the
Encyclopedia Astronautica:

http://www.astronautix.com/flights/


Rusty

On Sat, 31 Dec 2005 21:45:58 -0800, Rusty
wrote:



After STS-107 I created a spreadsheet with Shuttle flight data.
I have not updated it since then, but you can download it
and add STS-114 data.

To download the shuttle spreadsheet:

Go to my Geocities Redstone missile Links page:
http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/links.htm

The first link is the shuttle spreadsheet.
Just right click on "Space Shuttle Spreadsheet" and save it.

http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/shuttle.xls



I have now updated the file to include STS-114 info.


Rusty

"Rusty" wrote in message...
After STS-107 I created a spreadsheet with Shuttle flight data.
I have not updated it since then, but you can download it
and add STS-114 data.

To download the shuttle spreadsheet:

Go to my Geocities Redstone missile Links page:
http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/links.htm

The first link is the shuttle spreadsheet.
Just right click on "Space Shuttle Spreadsheet" and save it.

http://www.geocities.com/redstone_mrbm/shuttle.xls



I have now updated the file to include STS-114 info.


Rusty

Nice job! Thanks!