Space Shuttle commentary

On a pleasant day while strolling in sci.space.shuttle, a person by the
name of "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
exclaimed:
For example, "... but the ideal cargo ship is an automated and unmanned one:
it costs less, weighs less and is expandable.'
Why? Name one case on earth where that's true? All cargo ships have crews,
as do all cargo aircraft.

Not that the original article addresses it, but the obvious answer is
that you don't need life support and gentle operations to let humans
live through it. Since most of the operation is too complex/demanding to
be manually controlled by humans, you might as well give the computer
full control.
--
aaronl at consultant dot com
For every expert, there is an equal and
opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke

"Aaron Lawrence" wrote in message
m...
On a pleasant day while strolling in sci.space.shuttle, a person by the
name of Brian Thorn exclaimed:
Exactly how fast do you think Soyuz rides its rails out to the launch
pad?

I'm quite curious about this. Is soyuz transported horizontally? (Buran
was) If so I assume it IS a bit faster than shuttle.

A bit, but probably not by much. There's not a huge need.



--
aaronl at consultant dot com
For every expert, there is an equal and
opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke

"Aaron Lawrence" wrote in message
m...
On a pleasant day while strolling in sci.space.shuttle, a person by the
name of "Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
exclaimed:
For example, "... but the ideal cargo ship is an automated and unmanned
one:
it costs less, weighs less and is expandable.'
Why? Name one case on earth where that's true? All cargo ships have
crews,
as do all cargo aircraft.

Not that the original article addresses it, but the obvious answer is
that you don't need life support and gentle operations to let humans
live through it. Since most of the operation is too complex/demanding to
be manually controlled by humans, you might as well give the computer
full control.

Umm, that's no obvious at all.

In fact the opposite is probably more obvious. Computers are great a
routine complex tasks but generally fail miserable at the non-routine.

Having a crew on-board tends to make things safer as they can often cope
better with the unexpected.

And tell the crew of a 747 cargo jet they don't need life-support. They may
disagree.


--
aaronl at consultant dot com
For every expert, there is an equal and
opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke

Aaron Lawrence wrote:

On a pleasant day while strolling in sci.space.shuttle, a person by the
name of Brian Thorn exclaimed:

Exactly how fast do you think Soyuz rides its rails out to the launch
pad?

I'm quite curious about this. Is soyuz transported horizontally? (Buran
was) If so I assume it IS a bit faster than shuttle.

Why would you assume so? Soyuz is still a fairly delicate piece of
machinery.

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

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

"Brian Thorn" wrote in message
...
On 26 Oct 2006 13:15:52 -0700, "www.spaceboot.eu"
wrote:
"I suppose one could build a new shuttle in 6 months, no? "

Multiply that number by 10. Five years is how long it took to build
Endeavour after Challenger was destroyed.

And that was by using a lot of structural spares that NASA had previously
built. If you have to start from scratch, i.e. rebuild the tooling needed
to build structural components, it will likely take quite a bit longer than
it took to build Endeavour. If I recall correctly, NASA never got the
funding to build new structural spares after the Challenger disaster.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

"Aaron Lawrence" wrote in message
m...
On a pleasant day while strolling in sci.space.shuttle, a person by the
name of Brian Thorn exclaimed:
Exactly how fast do you think Soyuz rides its rails out to the launch
pad?

I'm quite curious about this. Is soyuz transported horizontally? (Buran
was) If so I assume it IS a bit faster than shuttle.

Considering that it takes at least a couple of months to turn around a
shuttle, the time it takes to transport it to the pad on the MLP hardly
seems significant.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)

Monte Davis wrote:
(Derek Lyons) wrote:

Pretty typical of the armchair astronaut/engineer genre - an
idealistic proposal utterly inoccent of any contamination from
political, economic, or engineering reality.

That says it pretty well.

Monte Davis
http://montedavis.livejournal.com

And what is so wrong about having ideals and trying to accomplish
something that comes close to them? Contamination is indeed the correct
word. :-)
Anybody who has read Freeman Dyson will know what I mean. The article
just tried to make a very important point : keep things simple. The
Shuttle just isn't.

Skunk wrote:
Leave NASA for the cutting edge stuff and
interplanetary/moon travel and evolve near Earth orbit
missions toward private enterprise.Government has a very
poor track record when it comes to financial efficiency.

Agreed, I just think it's a pity it's taking so long. The ISS is just a
bigger & better version of Mir, been there, done that. NASA should
think out of the box and move on right now. And ESA. And the
Russians... (also see the other article:
http://www.spaceboot.eu/index.php?op...21&Itemi d=48)

Also agree that no space agency should depend on another, even if the
cost is higher. Healthy competition isn't a bad thing. :-)

Brian Thorn wrote:
"I suppose one could build a new shuttle in 6 months, no? "

Multiply that number by 10. Five years is how long it took to build
Endeavour after Challenger was destroyed.
OK, point taken. Strider said the same thing, must be true then.


Anyway, your "fun with statistics" makes it seem as if Shuttles
never turn around in less than 1 YEAR!

In fact, the fastest turnaround is around 2 months (Atlantis in 1985)
or 3 months post-Challenger (Columbia in 1997.) All else being equal,
Shuttles usually fly twice a year. There have been a few ocassions
where they've flown three times a year (Endeavour in 1993, Columbia in
both 1996 and 1997, Atlantis in 1991 and 1997.)
These are very interesting numbers, thanks for those. The average
however stands as it is, and indeed, I did have fun with the stats and
was amazed myself to see the average of 1 year, I didn't even have to
bend the numbers.
Of course, the two tragedies were what caused the average turnaround to
rise. On the other hand: a simple trustworthy system wouldn't have been
grounded for so long in case of failure.


"From the beginning on the protecting tiles from the heat-shield on
the shuttle were quite fragile and some came off even in the earliest
flights."

Columbia was not destroyed by damaged tiles. It was destroyed by a
damaged Reinforced Carbon-Carbon (RCC) panel on the wing leading edge,
something no one had considered vulnerable before. Tiles are very
different things, and were the original prime suspect in the Columbia
accident, but they were later exonerated.
OK, even so, tiles did come off and the shield had to be inspected many
times over, even during missions (cfr the most recent missions)

Greg D. Moore (Strider) wrote:
And tell the crew of a 747 cargo jet they don't need life-support. They may
disagree.

It's not the crew that doesn't need life-support, it's the 747 that
doesn't need a crew. :-)