So *was* Hubble maintenance cancelled because of the moon plan?

You 'man-rate' something humans *ride* on.


CMIW, but doesn't man-rating also apply to payloads that are *carried* in a
manned ship?

In article ,
Rand Simberg wrote:
If you want to play Evel Knievel on your own time and with your own
contraptions, then hey, it's a free country.
Evil Knievel does much riskier things than a Shuttle flight.

Not especially. Evel Knievel (note spelling) made dozens, maybe
hundreds of motorcycle jumps, and he didn't even ONCE get killed :-).
If you take his most famous, most dangerous jumps, there were still at
least a dozen of those. Even those then were not much more dangerous
than a shuttle flight, where the risk of death is historically 1 in 50.

Again, if you want to play 1 in 50 roulette with your life, that's
your choice. Astronomers should have nothing to do with it.

Large organizations such as governments and research institutes
shouldn't get involved.
So, no more wars, eh?

As they say, war can be a necessary evil. Manned spaceflight
in support of curiosity is unnecessary recklessness.
--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
/ \
\ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
\/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *

On Tue, 27 Jan 2004 04:29:25 +0000 (UTC), in a place far, far away,
(Greg Kuperberg) made the phosphor on
my monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

Again, if you want to play 1 in 50 roulette with your life, that's
your choice. Astronomers should have nothing to do with it.

And astronomers do have nothing to do with it. Orbital telescope
repairmen are not astronomers, and no one is asking astronomers to
risk their lives (any more than is required to drive up and down
narrow winding mountain roads).

Large organizations such as governments and research institutes
shouldn't get involved.
So, no more wars, eh?

As they say, war can be a necessary evil. Manned spaceflight
in support of curiosity is unnecessary recklessness.

Again, your definition of "unnecessary" is arbitrary. Do you have a
realistic and affordable plan to do Hubble servicing without sending
up people?

On 27 Jan 2004 04:09:48 GMT, in a place far, far away,
(G EddieA95) made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

You 'man-rate' something humans *ride* on.


CMIW, but doesn't man-rating also apply to payloads that are *carried* in a
manned ship?

They have to be rated for the Shuttle, but that's not what most mean
by man-rating.

In article ,
(G EddieA95) wrote:

Space flight isn't *inherently* dangerous or expensive. (though the
*shuttle* in particular, is some of both).

It's inherently dangerous in that human beings are taken to a deadly
environment where lots of engineering effort is needed to keep them alive.
It's inherently expensive in that enormous amounts of costly, complicated
equipment is needed to get there and back, and (now that Shuttle is going
away)
will be thrown away after each flight.

If it's "inherently dangerous" to service an satellite in LEO it will
presumably be even more so when human beings return to the Moon or set
off for Mars.

Should NASA therefore tell Bush that his grand plan is too dangerous for
poor vulnerable humanity to attempt? :-)

--
Stephen Souter

http://www.edfac.usyd.edu.au/staff/souters/

(Greg Kuperberg) writes:

As they say, war can be a necessary evil. Manned spaceflight
in support of curiosity is unnecessary recklessness.

You're real concerned about space astronomy's cost in deaths.

How about considering it's cost in lives? Space scopes have cost at
least 5 billion US$, so with an average wage of say 30 thousand US$/yr
(or post-tax high wage) over a working life of 40 yrs, means that over
4,000 man-lives have been spent (wasted in some minds) in support of
space astronomy. Lives that could have been spent developing fusion
or genetic engineering or watching TV. A few middle-aged deaths is
nothing by comparison. And even less if the analysis is based on the
costs of all spaceflight.

No, safety concerns are not based on cost/benefit/risk analysis;
they're based on the avoidance of social and political consequences.
Things hit the fan; reporters write nasty articles; people,
organizations, contries are embarrassed; money flow changes; people's
careers and power are effected; programs are cancelled; etc. We
probably lost one man for every mile-an-hour increase in jet speed in
the 50's without a halt in the increase. We loose tens of thousands
of innocent lives to alcoholic drivers and poor drivers without taking
serious steps to reduce it significantly. Just because our culture
now says drunkenness is funny and/or macho and that driver testing is
inconvenient and that such frivoulous deaths don't embarrass us, while
we consider spacecraft deaths an embarrassment to our country.

G EddieA95 wrote:

Space flight isn't *inherently* dangerous or expensive. (though the
*shuttle* in particular, is some of both).

It's inherently dangerous in that human beings are taken to a deadly
environment where lots of engineering effort is needed to keep them alive.
It's inherently expensive in that enormous amounts of costly, complicated
equipment is needed to get there and back, and (now that Shuttle is going away)
will be thrown away after each flight.

Enormous amounts of costly, complicated equipment are required to get
you to 35,000 feet in a 747. You wouldn't last very long there either.

In article ,
Gary W. Swearingen wrote:
(Greg Kuperberg) writes:
As they say, war can be a necessary evil. Manned spaceflight
in support of curiosity is unnecessary recklessness.
You're real concerned about space astronomy's cost in deaths.

No, I'm not all that concerned. I'm just saying that the Evel Knievel
aspect of the space shuttle is a minus.

How about considering it's cost in lives?

Yes, the cost of the space shuttle is an even bigger minus. And so is
the fact that Hubble isn't exactly what astronomers wanted. Among other
problems, it has a poor orbit.

Given that the space shuttle will supposedly have a few more flights,
then on balance I would have preferred one more Hubble service flight
to these pointless ISS missions. The ISS missions aren't actually
going be much safer anyway. The ISS needs to be nearby to meet safety
*requirements*, which is not the same thing as actual safety.

My point is just that the Hubble cancellation does have a significant
silver lining. Maybe space telescopes should be funded and maybe they
shouldn't. I think that some of them should. Either way, in the future
they won't be compromised by a bad launch system.
--
/\ Greg Kuperberg (UC Davis)
/ \
\ / Visit the Math ArXiv Front at http://front.math.ucdavis.edu/
\/ * All the math that's fit to e-print *

If it's "inherently dangerous" to service an satellite in LEO it will
presumably be even more so when human beings return to the Moon or set
off for Mars.

Should NASA therefore tell Bush that his grand plan is too dangerous for
poor vulnerable humanity [?]

No, I didn't say that. The human risk IMO is acceptable, and I think Hubble
should be fixed, even if we have to use a rented Progress+Soyuz to do it. I
was jut taking issue with "not inherently dangerous."

Believe is or not, it is OK to admit that something is dangerous. We just have
to defend the value of the risk.

Enormous amounts of costly, complicated equipment are required to get
you to 35,000 feet in a 747. You wouldn't last very long there either.

But it is not scrapped after each use, and that keeps the "inherent cost" down.
If we return to the Apollo capsule, I for one believe that what improvements
exist since 1969 in access to space, will vanish.