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18 Shuttle flights between now and 2010
I am a huge supporter of NASA, but I am wondering if NASA will
really be able to fly 18 shuttle flights between now and 2010, according to this article below. They will have to fly 4 or 5 shuttle flights a year starting in 2006. How realistic is this? http://www.flatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dl...53/1007/news02 Ray |
#2
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"Ray" wrote in news:L0u1f.6006$ar6.4338@trndny01:
I am a huge supporter of NASA, but I am wondering if NASA will really be able to fly 18 shuttle flights between now and 2010, according to this article below. They will have to fly 4 or 5 shuttle flights a year starting in 2006. How realistic is this? http://www.flatoday.com/apps/pbcs.dl...07/NEWS02/5100 70353/1007/news02 Your math is wrong. 18 shuttle flights (plus a possibly 19th for HST) over 2006-2010 is an average rate of *less* than four flights per year. For example: 2006 3 2007 4 2008 4 2009 4 2010 3 Four flights per year is very realistic for a three-orbiter fleet. During the first ten years after the post-51L return-to-flight, 1988-1998[1], the fleet flew 66 times. If you throw out Columbia's 14 flights after Endeavour debuted, you get an average rate between 5-6 per year. So an average rate of 3-4 per year for a three-orbiter fleet has quite a bit of pad in it. Note that the period in question had several lengthy standdowns, such as the hydrogen leak fiasco of 1990. The keys to achieving that rate will be twofold. One, ET foam-shedding has to continue to decrease until it's below the documented limits (hopefully NASA will achieve this on STS-121). Two, NASA must return to night launch capability[2]. This will result in some loss of capability for the ground-based cameras to detect impacts and damage. However, NASA has so many other means of detection/inspection (ground-based radar, aerial cameras, ET/SRB cameras, wing-leading-edge sensors, ET umbilical cameras, shuttle crew handheld cameras, RMS cameras, OBSS, ISS crew handheld cameras) that this should not be a big problem. [1] - this period is more representative of the 2006-2010 flight rate than 1998-2003 because there was a backlog of payloads waiting to fly on the shuttle, so shuttle availability was limited by the shuttle itself and not the payloads. In 1998-2003, on the other hand, shuttle flights were mostly limited by availability of ISS hardware to launch. [2] - the daytime launch limitation, combined with existing launch window constraints, only provides four or five good launch opportunities per year, which effectively eliminates most of the pad in the schedule since even a small launch delay can force a launch to slip two months or more for the next daytime opportunity. -- JRF Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail, check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and think one step ahead of IBM. |
#4
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no doubt there will be safety stand downs, that flight rate is a
dream... |
#6
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early demise would be a good thing. kill the shuttle before it kills
again |
#7
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I think it very realistic if every thing goes right, foam, money,
politics, weather. If all goes well I think the number will look somthing like this. 2006 2 2007 3 2008 4 2009 4 2010 5 (I think it will be more likly a 4 here) But given the past few years flight record, I think we will be lucky to get one or two flights a year. NASA has stage fright, and good reason to; to a point. Everytime some foam comes off look for the shuttle to be down for 6 or 7 months. Given that I look for the numbers to look like this 2006 2 2007 1 2008 1 (retired) |
#8
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Bob Haller wrote:
early demise would be a good thing. kill the shuttle before it kills again I think it may take no more than 20 Shuttle crushes to stop the program. Here is how I arrived to this number. It took 1 accident to kill the Concorde program. The life loss was little over 100 people. To arrive to the same magic number 100 with an accident death rate 7 people per flight it would take about 20 accidents. |
#9
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in article ,
blade_pride at wrote on 10/10/05 12:53 PM: I think it very realistic if every thing goes right, foam, money, politics, weather. If all goes well I think the number will look somthing like this. 2006 2 2007 3 2008 4 2009 4 2010 5 (I think it will be more likly a 4 here) But given the past few years flight record, I think we will be lucky to get one or two flights a year. NASA has stage fright, and good reason to; to a point. Everytime some foam comes off look for the shuttle to be down for 6 or 7 months. Given that I look for the numbers to look like this 2006 2 2007 1 2008 1 (retired) Isn't that a little like meeting you for breakfast and concluding that, based on the last 10 hours, you sleep most of the time? George Evans |
#10
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Attempting to fly safely will mean more safety groundings than
flying..... Just wait and watch.... |
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