NASA Details Risks to Astronauts on Mission to Hubble

In article ,
Stephen Bolton wrote:
...I would not just withdraw ISS support but actively
support the destruction of the station...

Remember, as president, you are party to signed international agreements
calling for its completion and operation. It may have been a mistake, but
it's not something you can unilaterally drop without repercussions, given
that several other countries have spent billions getting their hardware
ready for it based on your promises.

...Mind you, there is a VERY
strong argument that un-manned space activity is far more scientifically
productive...

Only if you ignore the lessons of the past and the actual numbers. The
problem with manned space activity is not that it is less productive, but
that the minimum size of productive mission is much larger (to the point
that adequate political support for it requires reasons more politically
compelling than science).

Best spend the money to invent the warp drive...

The small "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics" project at NASA -- which was
exploring odd corners of physics in hopes of finding something useful --
lost what little funding it had about 18 months ago.
--
MOST launched 30 June; science observations running | Henry Spencer
since Oct; first surprises seen; papers pending. |

bob haller wrote:

You might eat your wordsif uncontrollwed it happen to come down in NYC or other
highly populated location, like moscow.

If you use somethin g it must be properly fdisposed of afterwards, no littering
allowed.
HAVE A GREAT DAY!

Hey Bob...

There's this amazing subject called 'probability'. You might want to learn
about it, and the concept of 'expectation of a random variable'.

BTW, do you lose a lot of money gambling?

Paul

(Henry Spencer) wrote

Charles Buckley wrote:

...The reality is that they
are trying to rationalize the decision to complete ISS.

That doesn't really require rationalization; it is a political given.
ISS is not about science or space operations, but about international
politics, and it has been from its birth in the ashes of SSF.

The space station has always been about politics, international or
national. Different kinds of international politics after Christmas
Day 1991, but still politics, though there was, unsurprisingly,
a transitional period.

"Science," "exploration" and the like were PR excuses. It might
have evolved differently so that significant scientific results
fell out of the program, like they did out of Apollo, but that
didn't happen.

Alas.

There's this amazing subject called 'probability'. You might want to learn
about it, and the concept of 'expectation of a random variable'.


Ahh but thwe risk is the issue. the conditions at launch were proper disposal,
now many here say take your chances. that unacceptable. because we promised
that wouldnt be the approach.


BTW, do you lose a lot of money gambling?

Paul



I prefer gambling with friends. its fun and Itend to win.

Las vegas style I have little interest in
HAVE A GREAT DAY!

bob haller wrote:
There's this amazing subject called 'probability'. You might want to learn
about it, and the concept of 'expectation of a random variable'.



Ahh but thwe risk is the issue. the conditions at launch were proper disposal,
now many here say take your chances. that unacceptable. because we promised
that wouldnt be the approach.

Gosh, the government promises lots of things, Bob.

The truth is, it would be really stupid to want to spend hundreds
of millions of dollars to save (on average) .001 lives.

I mean, REALLY STUPID.

Collosally, incredibly, mind-bogglingly stupid.

And do you know why that is, Bob?

Because the same money spent elsewhere, or even the same money
not confiscated from the taxpayers, would save orders of magnitude
more lives.

Perhaps you just don't like people, Bob? And especially not
taxpayers? You apparently advocate positions that will end up
killing more people, and wasting our hard-earned dollars.

Paul

EAC wrote:


- Aim an ICBM at Hubble and use it blow up Hubble into pieces, the
pieces should burned up quite easily during re-entry.

Only detonating a nuke just ahead of it (sort of a nuclear-pulse
de-orbit) would insure that. And you likely know that that idea won't go
over well. Otherwise, much of Hubble would end up as orbiting debris.


--

You know what to remove, to reply....

Bruce Palmer wrote:

Scott M. Kozel wrote:
http://www.floridatoday.com/news/spa...501SHUTTLE.htm

NASA details risks to astronauts on mission to Hubble
_FLORIDA TODAY_ - May 1, 2004

CAPE CANAVERAL -- NASA for the first time Friday detailed its reasons
for a controversial decision to scrap a servicing mission to the Hubble
Space Telescope, saying the flight would entail higher risk to
astronauts.

Those aboard a crippled shuttle in open space could only survive a month
at most, significantly cutting time available to stage a rescue mission,
the agency said.

snip

There, "you have friends that have air and electricity and food and
water and all the necessary means to hang out and give you options to
fix the problem," he said. "That's just common sense."

[end of article]

I can't believe they actually wrote up this rationalization.

With this kind of thinking we never would have launched STS-1.

Which had visible tile damage on its OMS pods. Which brings me to...

Or
STS-2. Or ........


The idea of STA as a safe refuge is useful only in a limited range of
emergecies, and the disasters we've already had are outside that range.
ISS doesn't help with a major launch/ascent malfunction, and it doesn't
help with re-entry hazards you didn't *know* about, once on-orbit.


--

You know what to remove, to reply....

In article , Joann Evans
wrote:

"Scott M. Kozel" wrote:


The agency's bottom line: Any flight to Hubble or elsewhere "is clearly
riskier than a flight to the station," NASA deputy shuttle program
manager Wayne Hale said.

There, "you have friends that have air and electricity and food and
water and all the necessary means to hang out and give you options to
fix the problem," he said. "That's just common sense."

[end of article]


Wow. What did we ever do before ISS...?

We died. Space travel in those days was horrendously dangerous, unlike
travel to ISS.

But think of the seven astronauts that would have survived if the
Challenger had blown up 73 seconds into a launch to the Space Station,
instead of to an empty orbit that didn't provide safe haven.

And think of the crew of Apollo I, and imagine how much safer they
would have been if they were rehearsing a launch to some place with
electricity and food, instead of to a barren Moon.

The Soyuz 1 parachute failure would never have happened if there were a
space station.

And obviously, the Salyut 1 crew would have survived if their mission
had been to a space station.

--
David M. Palmer (formerly @clark.net, @ematic.com)

"Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
Any HST servicing mission worth the name will involve at least four EVAs,
which means two EVA teams (4 people). Add the IVA and the CDR and that gets
you to six. So you can reduce it from seven to six, but probably no further
without gutting the mission.

At any point in time, you have 2 EVA crewmembers, the IVA and a CDR. A crew
member may be too tired to do 2 EVAs in a row member but on the day after,
can't he act as an IVA ?

EVA1 EVA2 IVA
day1 1 2 3
day2 3 4 1
day3 1 2 4
day4 3 4 2

You could do the mission with 4 "mission specialists" and one CDR. Total of 5.

It isn't a question of number of people dead if there is an accident. Whether
it is 3 5 or 7 doesn't make much of a difference from the point of view of
media coverage of the accident.

However, by reducing the number of people, you can extend on-orbit survivability.

Furthermore, before reaching HST altitude, the shuttle can determine its
health and stay at lower orbit and start saving from day 2, greatly extending
its on-orbit duration capability.

I find the excuses (they are just excuses) given by NASA lack credibility.

However, there was a recent article in the New York Times (sorry URL escapes
me at the time) where the write listed a whole bunch of research project that
had already been canned by NASA due to Bush's election speech last January.

What has really happened is that NASA is cutting projects left and right, but
still has nowhere near enough money to build that mars spaceship. So the end
result is that NASA is downsizing itself out of existance.


Safety is not an issue. As long as NASA implements all of CAIB technical
recommentations, the Shuttle will be usable to HST. Where there is a will,
there is a way.

NASA apologists use to say that it was impossible to EVA to fix tiles. Didn't
take long for NASA engineers to change their tune and now it will happen.

If tasked to go to Hubble safely, I am certain NASA will find a way to do it.
If NASA cannot make Shuttle safe, it cannot make CEV or whetever safe either.

Recall that on Apollo 13, had the explosion damaged the heat shield, it would
also have been toast. Would this make all capsules as unsafe as the Shuttle ?

"Paul F. Dietz" wrote:
I will be *amazed* if any solution but this one is taken.
HST has a 1 in 1000 chance of killing someone on reentry.
It would be absurd to spends hundreds of millions of dollars to
save .001 lives.

International agreements/commitments.

When a nuclear satellite fell over Canada, it took forever for the Canadian
government to get the russians to pay for the cost of searching for debris
cleaning up the mess.

And when Skylab fell on australia, it made Australia quite mad that it was
used as a rubbish bin.

Safe re-entry of any satellite is a must, and precedents must not continue to
be set that anyone and everyone can send junk in space and have it fall down "anywhere".