|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#21
|
|||
|
|||
Unmanned Shuttle
On Jun 11, 1:08 pm, " wrote:
Of course I would like to see the shuttle continue flying as a unmanned cargo vehicle. this would allow station completion flights with no risk of crew deaths. gut lots of life support stuff and things from crew cabin like no longer needed seats to increase cargo weight capacity. Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the whole shebang? -Still learning.... -Charles Talleyrand |
#22
|
|||
|
|||
Unmanned Shuttle
On Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:20:27 -0700, in a place far, far away, Charles
Talleyrand made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the whole shebang? No, but the ability to allow it to do so is trivial, other than opposition from the astronaut office... |
#23
|
|||
|
|||
Maximum Rate Shuttle Launches
In article .com,
Charles Talleyrand wrote: ...That rate would require quite a few more facilities -- e.g., two or three more of the big simulators at JSC -- and a lot of money. Can you tell us more about these big simulators? Are these flight simulators needed to train pilots, or some other thing? They're the whole-orbiter simulators in which a lot of the late-preflight crew training takes place. Currently there are only two of them, and the Rogers Commission report estimated that that fact alone would limit the flight rate to 10-12/year. They were very heavily booked in 1985. I would find it quite odd if the rate limiting item for shuttle launches was pilot training. Not impossible, just suprising. It's not so much that you need to train the pilots to fly the thing, as that a crew needs to train together fairly intensively to get to the point where it reacts to a surprise emergency as a coordinated whole, with no fumbling and no crossed wires. So long as you're putting together a fresh crew for each flight -- which is partly driven by the diversity of payloads and partly just by the way the Astronaut Office does things -- this is an inevitable overhead. You could avoid a lot of that with more drastic rethinking of how things are done, going back to how Slayton thought flight operations should run: + Small basic flight crews that stay together and fly repeatedly, and are in charge of the orbiter; in the event of an emergency, everybody else's job is to sit down and shut up. They don't do payloads. + Individual mission specialists, or small teams of them, for the more stereotyped payloads and for spacewalk work. They *do* specialize, and fly whenever their particular talents and training are useful. + Payload specialists, who are (horrors!) *not* professional astronauts, for most things related to payloads. This has two big problems. First, it would greatly reduce the power of Astronaut Office management, by taking a lot of the suspense and mystery out of crew selection. And second, the astronauts hate having to let non-astronauts into their flying clubhouses. -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | |
#24
|
|||
|
|||
Unmanned Shuttle
Rand Simberg wrote:
On Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:20:27 -0700, in a place far, far away, Charles Talleyrand made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the whole shebang? No, but the ability to allow it to do so is trivial, Perhaps for launch and landing. Not so for docking. That would be a distinctly non-trivial upgrade. |
#25
|
|||
|
|||
Maximum Rate Shuttle Launches
Somwhere on my desktop machine 400 miles away, I have a quick writeup on
this. The long poll in the tent used to be the MLPs. There's only 3. Now of course only 3 orbiters only. But you're limited to stacking only 3 stacks at a time. So, before when we had 4 orbiters, it really was a matter of how long an MLP was in use. I think I calculated that a reasonable number of up to 18 flights for a year or so. You'd need to fly an orbiter every 3 months. The typical turn-around (at the time I read up on this) was about 3 months. So that's not to bad of a change. SRB sets I think there were plenty. So I determined it was the MLP that was the issue. There's also some steps you could make to make things easier. Refly the same crews as often as possible, especially for the PLT/CDR. Try to fly similar payloads in the same orbiter, again to minimize changes required. After a year or so though, you start to hit into things like scheduled maintenance (OMDP,) -- Greg Moore SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available! Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html wrote in message oups.com... Given a few extra billion dollars, and a year or two for preparation, what sort of sustainable launch rate could the shuttle attain? -Curious -Charles Talleyrand |
#26
|
|||
|
|||
Unmanned Shuttle
On Jun 11, 9:53?pm, "Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
Rand Simberg wrote: On Mon, 11 Jun 2007 16:20:27 -0700, in a place far, far away, Charles Talleyrand made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that: Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the whole shebang? No, but the ability to allow it to do so is trivial, Perhaps for launch and landing. Not so for docking. That would be a distinctly non-trivial upgrade. soyuz could ferry trained pilots to handle final docking |
#27
|
|||
|
|||
Maximum Rate Shuttle Launches
"Henry Spencer" wrote in message ... Plus there is that little problem that at such rates, you're probably only a few years from another loss-of-orbiter accident. (One of the more interesting post-Challenger reports -- from OTA? I forget -- concluded that ongoing orbiter production was mandatory for reliable long-term operations, especially if projects like the space station needed a guaranteed minimum fleet size. This was not what people wanted to hear just then, so that report was quietly shelved...) I've often wondered in the value if NASA had simply flown additional flights with minimal payload and called them "research" flights. This would allow them to do things like work on workflow, gain additional experience and data on usage, etc. i.e. actually treat the damn thing like a research program. And guess what, we're about to make the same mistakes with VSE (and that's a general rant, not direct at Henry :-) -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | -- Greg Moore SQL Server DBA Consulting Remote and Onsite available! Email: sql (at) greenms.com http://www.greenms.com/sqlserver.html |
#28
|
|||
|
|||
Unmanned Shuttle
In article . com,
Charles Talleyrand wrote: Can the shuttle fly with no one on board? Takeoff, dock, land, the whole shebang? Takeoff and land, not quite, but there are no fundamental obstacles -- it's just a matter of giving the computers control of a few things that are currently done manually (either for safety or because it was just easier that way). If memory serves, some of those changes were going to be made anyway, because the "safe haven at space station" plan requires unmanned de-orbit capability to clear the broken orbiter off the station. For most orbital operations, I have a dim memory that there are some more issues, but it's mostly the same thing -- a little more computer control needed in certain areas. The one big sticky issue is that the US has no flight-proven automated or teleoperated docking capability. Lots of lab experiments, and one or two attempts at in-space tests, but nothing available off the shelf. -- spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. | |
#29
|
|||
|
|||
Maximum Rate Shuttle Launches
|
#30
|
|||
|
|||
Maximum Rate Shuttle Launches
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)" wrote:
After a year or so though, you start to hit into things like scheduled maintenance (OMDP,) That's not a problem for a sustained rate - because it's merely a scheduling issue. It sounds like your write up was more based on 'how long could a surge be maintained and how high would the surge rate be'. D. -- Touch-twice life. Eat. Drink. Laugh. -Resolved: To be more temperate in my postings. Oct 5th, 2004 JDL |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Expendable launches with shuttle installs | [email protected] | Space Shuttle | 5 | July 8th 06 10:40 PM |
shuttle launches on HDNet | ctt | Space Shuttle | 1 | April 5th 06 07:26 PM |
How to Guarantee Maximum Shuttle Safety | bob haller | Space Shuttle | 0 | December 29th 04 01:08 PM |
Shuttle maximum altitude | Mike Miller | Space Shuttle | 18 | November 18th 03 02:01 PM |
Was a second rate FOAM used in the shuttle???? | hank | Space Shuttle | 17 | September 14th 03 02:10 PM |