Soyuz TMA-11 Comes Home, More or Less...

Pat Flannery wrote:
Oh, I remember those days.


And speaking of those days, very rosy economic predictions for the
Shuttle, from NASA's history office itself itself:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch6.htm

Pat

Pat Flannery writes:



Of course, the Soviet Mir gave the Reagan administration to perfect
opportunity to shovel yet more money at the aerospace industry...so that
Socialism's Shining Star wouldn't scare our children as they looked up
at the night sky and realized Commies were up their giving them the
finger and just waiting to bury them. :-)


I worked at LeRC in that era, and that was my impression as well.
--
A host is a host from coast to
& no one will talk to a host that's close........[v].(301) 56-LINUX
Unless the host (that isn't close).........................pob 1433
is busy, hung or dead....................................20915-1433

On Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:36:21 -0500, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:



Derek Lyons wrote:
Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.


No, no, no... Shuttle was designed to lower the per-pound cost of
getting things and people into LEO for NASA, commercial interests, and
the DOD.

No, it wasn't.

That was the ostensible program goal, but it wasn't actually
*designed* that way.

Please try to keep up.

Pat Flannery wrote:

Derek Lyons wrote:
Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.


No, no, no... Shuttle was designed to lower the per-pound cost of
getting things and people into LEO for NASA, commercial interests, and
the DOD.

No, that was Day Two.

D.
--
Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh.

http://derekl1963.livejournal.com/

-Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings.
Oct 5th, 2004 JDL

David Lesher wrote:
Of course, the Soviet Mir gave the Reagan administration to perfect
opportunity to shovel yet more money at the aerospace industry...so that
Socialism's Shining Star wouldn't scare our children as they looked up
at the night sky and realized Commies were up their giving them the
finger and just waiting to bury them. :-)



I worked at LeRC in that era, and that was my impression as well.


Using all the funds set toward building the new space station in
multiple redesigns of it was a "unique" approach to a new manned space
program, to say the least.
What's that work out to in regards to dollars versus artist's concepts,
anyway?
Around a million dollars per crack?
Hell, NASA must have had Michelangelo's ghost working for them. :-D

Pat

(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Which, in my book, makes the person who thinks that's a condemnation
of the Shuttle... an idiot. Because that was the goal of the Shuttle
from Day One, to work with a space station.

The seemingly neat circularity emerged after the fact. With cheaper
and more frequent access, the station could have been built soon and
cheap enough, equipped and staffed adequately, to actually *do* the
kinds of research originally promised.

But with the successive delays and downscoping, that has never been
possible. Unfortunately, that has discredited the whole premise and we
get the "all we do is go around in circles in LEO" mindset, and a
vague sense that "they tried all that free-fall science and nothing
panned out" -- when in fact, all but a few token bits of science have
been squeezed out by the demands of just getting it "complete" before
the oldest parts reached the end of safe service life.

(NB: I'm not claiming the most hyped promises -- the giant protein
crystals, perfect ball bearings, breakthroughs in undersatnding
free-fall physiology etc -- would have paid off; I'm saying there's
never been a chance of finding out with the very limited equipment and
even more limited time available for them).

It's as if I'd tried to build a house on a mountaintop using a
Lamborghini to carry materials and workmen. Surprisingly, the house
ends up a lot more expensive, less spacious and well-equipped than I'd
hoped... and I conclude "well, that proves a house on a moiuntaintop
is a dumb idea."

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com/

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
news:t8OdnZRp47XB4Y_VnZ2dnUVZ_qCunZ2d@northdakotat elephone...


Pat Flannery wrote:
Oh, I remember those days.


And speaking of those days, very rosy economic predictions for the
Shuttle, from NASA's history office itself itself:
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch6.htm

Those rosy predictions were used to *sell* shuttle to the politicians. It
wasn't actually *designed* to meet those cost goals. In fact, during the
design process, decisions were often made that traded lower development
costs for higher operational costs. Ease of maintenance was clearly not a
primary goal of the design. These design trades did, however, help insure
that the shuttle's development costs were kept close to the initial
predictions. Unfortunately, those decisions also meant that the system is a
real p.i.t.a. to fly and maintain.

Unfortunately, the system, as designed, takes *a lot* of man-hours of work
to turn it around. The TPS and SSME's were really problematic in the
beginning. The toxic OMS, RCS, and APU propellants impact the workflow due
to the need to be wearing environmental suits when working on those systems
(you can't just "gas and go" on the pad). The SRB's are so hard to
refurbish that it's hard to justify refurbishment on cost alone
(refurbishment actually gives you a chance to inspect the things, so it's
justifiable on safety grounds). That and there are lots of safety rules to
follow when stacking SRB's in the VAB. Liquid boosters that are fueled on
the pad would have been easier to deal with from a workflow point of view,
but would have cost a lot more to develop.

Electronics boxes on the orbiter are hard to change out, since things ended
up pretty crammed in areas like the engine compartment, behind storage areas
in the mid-deck, and under the mid-deck floor. Work-flows have to be
carefully planned because so many people need access to the inside of the
shuttle to do so many different jobs.

Payloads ended up to be work intensive to change out. Lots of power, data,
O2, N2, cooling, and etc. connections to demate, mate, and test. The
airlock turned out to be hard to move from internal to external and back, so
that wasn't done often. And so forth and so on.

All of the "little things" you have to insert into the workflow really add
up from the program's point of view.

Jeff
--
A clever person solves a problem.
A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein

Monte Davis wrote:
(NB: I'm not claiming the most hyped promises -- the giant protein
crystals, perfect ball bearings, breakthroughs in undersatnding
free-fall physiology etc -- would have paid off; I'm saying there's
never been a chance of finding out with the very limited equipment and
even more limited time available for them).


Don't forget curing AIDS; I once heard a NASA agitprop ISS claim it
could maybe do that also.
Then there were the perfect crystals and ball bearings, and bizarre new
metal alloys impossible to make on Earth.
Not that they are going to be made in usable quantities up on the ISS.

It's as if I'd tried to build a house on a mountaintop using a
Lamborghini to carry materials and workmen. Surprisingly, the house
ends up a lot more expensive, less spacious and well-equipped than I'd
hoped... and I conclude "well, that proves a house on a moiuntaintop
is a dumb idea."

During a lightning storm it probably is.
You might also want to consider the amount of fuel you are going to us
getting up to that mountain top after going to buy groceries, and what's
going to happen if your brakes fail on the way down from it someday. ;-)

Pat

Jeff Findley wrote:
Unfortunately, those decisions also meant that the system is a
real p.i.t.a. to fly and maintain.

Unfortunately, the system, as designed, takes *a lot* of man-hours of work
to turn it around. The TPS and SSME's were really problematic in the
beginning. The toxic OMS, RCS, and APU propellants impact the workflow due
to the need to be wearing environmental suits when working on those systems
(you can't just "gas and go" on the pad).


The original Faget two-component reusable design would have been hell to
turn around also.
In that case you would have had all the complexities of inspecting the
orbiter after every flight, plus the added burden of checking out the
big winged booster stage and its TPS after every flight also.

Pat

The original Faget two-component reusable design would have been hell to
turn around also.
In that case you would have had all the complexities of inspecting the
orbiter after every flight, plus the added burden of checking out the
big winged booster stage and its TPS after every flight also.

Pat

Somewhere, I still have a copy of "My Weekly Reader" from around 1971
or '72. The cover story was about the design competition for the
future space shuttle, and featured illustrations of 3 different
concepts; all of them huge, and all of them needlessly complex. All
these years later, and I still have the same question that I had in
the 6th grade...

"What happened to project Dyna-Soar?"

Small, reusable lifting bodies mounted on top of Titan-variant
boosters fueled by hypergolic propellants. Get in the truck, push the
START button and "Blast Off!" (well, no, not quite, but a lot closer
than anything we've got now). Leave all of the heavy lifting to the
big, dumb, disposable boosters, that's what they were designed for.

But in order to procure funding, everything was promised to everybody
and we wound up with the beautiful, exquisite mess that is the STS;
not quite the right machine for any mission. And although it sounds
harsh, from an operational standpoint perhaps the worst part is that
no one involved with the STS project seemed to have ever watched any
'50's TV Sci-Fi. If the Space Rangers lost a ship, it was certainly a
tragedy; but there were still 20 (or 50, or 100) more ships in the
fleet. By designing a shuttle large enough to carry IUS boosters into
orbit (oh, and a few passengers, too), we wound up with only a handful
of extremely expensive vehicles, the loss of one of which constituted
1/4 OF THE FLEET in addition to the loss of the crew.

When the X-38 project came along, I thought perhaps some degree of
sanity had prevailed. No such luck. That project apparently made too
much sense, so obviously it had to be cancelled (after all of the
development money was spent, of course). I think maybe you're right,
Pat, the real purpose is just to spend money. After all, they managed
to "downsize" the space station until the redesigns cost more than
building the original concept would have, right?