Space Shuttle Grounded Indefinitely AGAIN Due To Major Flaw

Dr. P. Quackenbush ) wrote:

: "Zigler" wrote in message
: ...
:
: I was talking to a crazy ******* today who expressed the opinion:
:
: "what a ****ing waste of time and money. Who'd have thought that humans
: weren't meant for outer space, unless they watched too much
: sci-fi or the Jetsons... The white man has ****ed up the earth and now
: wants to extend its "progress" to the rest of the galaxy..."
:
: I'm not sure what to make of such radical views, but I would like to know
: the real benefit to humanity for this obsession with
: traveling and "conquering" outer space when things right here on earth are
: royally ****ed and millions are starving to death of no
: fault of their own. It makes you think, if you do think at all.


: The Meek shall inherit the Earth.

: The rest of us are going to the stars.


I like that! Is it original?

Eric

Iolaos ) wrote:
: In article
: "Jon S. Berndt" jsb.at.hal-pc-dot.org wrote:
:
: To see the shuttle broken again really hurts. Now it's a
: tragedy again.
: ...
: Ground the Shuttle forever!
:
: etc.
:
: Geez. I thought I'd test the waters and revisit s.s.s and
: s.s.p. Then to
: see crap like this again ... The signal to noise ratio is
: still too low.
:
: We've got a camera on the ET, now, for only the second time in
: the program.
: It's not that this hasn't been happening all along. Now we
: just know about
: it. Sure, the insulation issue it needs to be addressed, but I
: don't see a
: really long standdown due to this. I have a hunch that the
: orbiter belly is
: cleaner (fewer divots) than in most previous flights based on
: what I've seen
: so far. The ascent was very uneventful, in the words of
: Commander Collins,
: as I recall reading.
:
: That's what Rick Husband said, too.

The piece of foam striking Coumbia's wing was far from uneventful no
matter what ANYONE said. This piece off Discovery's main fuel tank struck
nothing. Doesn't mean that all is fine or that we should ignore what
happened. It just means that we need to find and fix the problem, and not
lose our heads as several on this board seem to be doing. Think Ben
Franklin! Actually it is Rudyard Kipling..."...keep your head when all
about you are losing theirs..."

Eric

Steven L. ) wrote:
: wrote:

: Every once in a long while, there's a story that brings me nearly to
: tears. This is one of them. Ever since I was a little kid, I loved
: everything about spaceflight, and space science. I had such hopes for
: the return to flight -- a triumph after a tragedy. My father was on the
: Columbia Disaster Recovery Crew. Picking up the pieces. To see the
: shuttle broken again really hurts.

: "Broken again"???

: The shuttle was broken from the day they built it.

Yeah, 25 years and over 100 flights constitutes a failure.

: Some things, like the Rube Goldberg system of fragile thermal protection
: tiles which can come off for all sorts of reasons, are basic design flaws.

Yeah, I'm sure another, better material exists for reusable launch
vehicles but NASA simply won't use it.

: So is the use of solid rocket boosters (SRBs). Rockwell, the winning
: bidder for the shuttle contract, touted SRBs as "more reliable" than
: liquid-fueled boosters. Talk about a half-truth. It is true that the
: failure rate of solid rockets is lower than the failure rate of
: liquid-fueled boosters. But when a solid rocket fails, it fails
: *catastrophically*. When a liquid rocket fails, it shuts down. When a
: solid rocket fails, it explodes.

And the SRBs blew up how many times during the shuttle program?

: Why did NASA go with this poor design rather than the competing
: McDonnell Douglas design? The usual reason. Low bid.

So MD had a better design and even after 25 years none of its benefits
were used? I think you're dealing with a pie-in-the-sky, anything that you
can put on paper is better than what we are using, approach.

Eric

: --
: Steven D. Litvintchouk
: Email:

: Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:25:31 +0000 (UTC),
(Eric Chomko) wrote:

Going into space is actually an art form in the humanities sense. If you
think art and music are worthless, then there is no point in trying to
convince you that going into space is worthwhile. But, if you do
appreciate art, then by extension space travel is a similar endeavour,
not unlike climbing a mountain or any other form of human exploration.

That's funny I thought NASA's purpose was science and engineering
research and development. I guess I was wrong, it's 'art'. Is the
shuttle program the equivalent of painting a red strip down a black
background, calling it 'modern art', and selling it to some sucker for
a million bucks?

Amusing the justifications we see to try to justify NASA's current
course.

What NASA probably needs is to be chopped up into little bits.
There's a use for two N.A.C.A. like technology programs -- one for
space, one for the atmosphere, seperated -- and a space science
program. The current big tent seems to be too much of a money pit.

--
Robb McLeod )
A bus station is where a bus stops. A train station is where a train stops.
On my desk I have a work station...

OrionCA wrote:

The SRBs, otoh, have
proven exceptionally reliable aside from the Challenger disaster and
that design flaw has been fixed.

"Exceptionally reliable aside from the Challenger disaster" calls to
mind something the security chief at Boston-Logan airport said to
reporters, the week after 9-11: "Our security measures always worked
very well, until this one tragic incident."


My biggest problem with the shuttle is they tried to make it into a
reusable truck when they should have concentrated on making it a
personnel shuttle to carry 5-10 astronauts to LEO and back. The extra
size, weight, and complexity doomed the Space Shuttle from the
beginning.

In fairness to NASA, they didn't originally conceive of the Shuttle
lifting that big a payload. The original idea behind the Shuttle was,
as you say, to lift astronauts into LEO to service a Space Station. But
Nixon canceled the Space Station, leaving the Shuttle with no real
purpose. That's when it got revamped into the notion of a "space truck"
that could lift payloads into orbit.

And after that, the Pentagon demanded that the payload capacity had to
be nearly *doubled* to handle the payloads they were going to put on it.
NASA, desperate to find paying customers for the Shuttle, agreed to
the change.


--
Steven D. Litvintchouk
Email:

Remove the NOSPAM before replying to me.

OrionCA wrote:
Didn't you see that film of the Atlas on the pad, eating itself? I
thought it was fairly impressive myself.

Of course that was *one* accident - a long time ago. But somehow you
hold that against liquids - while not being honest enough to hold
solids to the same standard.

The SRBs, otoh, have proven exceptionally reliable aside from the
Challenger disaster and that design flaw has been fixed.

Which handwaving changes things not one bit. Solid motors fail less
often than liquids - but their failure modes are almost universally
catastrophic. The Shuttle SRB's are but on of many flying solids.

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

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

Steven L. wrote:

But when a solid rocket fails, it fails *catastrophically*. When a
liquid rocket fails, it shuts down. When a solid rocket fails, it
explodes.


The one on Challenger didn't.

Pat

OrionCA wrote:

Didn't you see that film of the Atlas on the pad, eating itself?


Which one? A lot of them did that- Thors were pretty good in that regard
also. :-D
And the Saturn V's F-1 engines had a tendency to explode under test.

I
thought it was fairly impressive myself. A fuel line to the engines
ruptured and the escaping fuel caught fire. The rocket lost
structural integrity and collapsed inwards on the fireball until the
fire reached the fuel tanks and it blew up.


Imagine that happening on the pad right next to the ET- there is going
to be one mighty big boom in very short order as the heat causes the LOX
and LH2 to start to vaporize.

The SRBs, otoh, have
proven exceptionally reliable aside from the Challenger disaster and
that design flaw has been fixed.

I'm not disputing your central point, btw: Personally I believe God
intended space vehicles to ride ON TOP of the rocket, not strapped to
the side where launch debris could bounce off the undercarriage.


I never liked that Shuttle side-stacked design from the moment I laid
eyes on it.
It generates a lot of wetted area, and henceforth drag during ascent;
and you've got all sorts of strange things going on with airflow between
the orbiter and the ET at different speeds and altitudes.

Pat

Eric Chomko wrote:

: The Meek shall inherit the Earth.

: The rest of us are going to the stars.


I like that! Is it original?



No, I think it's something that somebody in the Ming Dynasty said as the
coolies lit the 47 SRBs on the back of his chair. :-)

Pat

Henry Spencer wrote:

In article . net,
Steven L. wrote:


The Shuttle is scheduled to be phased out around 2008...



No, 2010, and it has work to do before then -- there are commitments to
be met, promises to keep.



That's a good one! This administration knows all about commitments and
promises. :-D



Maybe the Bush Administration should just stop beating a dead horse,
junk the Shuttle, and institute a high-priority crash program to build a
new state-of-the-art vehicle.



High-priority crash programs are very expensive, especially when done by
today's NASA and its traditional contractors, and the political support to
spend that kind of money on spaceflight isn't there -- not in the White
House, not in Congress, not in public opinion.


But if we say: "Well, all that money that would have been used on those
last fourteen Shuttle flights could be used to BUILD THE MOST
MAGNIFICENT NEW ROCKETSHIPS YOU EVER LAID EYES ON!" then the equation
changes somewhat.

Pat