|
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
#1
|
|||
|
|||
Shuttle musings/rant.
My opinions about the shuttle change from day to day, depending on what I
see NASA using it for, and what their other non shuttle plans appear to be. Over the years, I have grown pragmatic over the whole situation. When I look at the other designs for the shuttle that was considered when it was built. Ones presented by other manufacturers. It sometime leaves me wondering why we are stuck with the current one to this day. It was marketed as a first generation space plane. Something that would be easy and cheap to maintain. It also had bragging rights over a low initial price tag. Even though it would have a slightly more expensive "per launch" cost. So they ordered 5 of them plus the enterprise for testing. Price tag was 30 and some odd billion dollars. Now, here comes the maintenance part. There is problem with space shuttle. You don't have a manufacturers warranty. When one is destroyed, you can't just turn in an insurance claim, and get a new one. Maintenance is a purely "do it yourself" type of affair. There is no "Online space shuttle consumer reviews website" to look at, to see which one is the best one to buy. So, when you pick a design, you may end up with a totally unusable piece of equipment. That is just a risk you accept from the beginning. If you are unable to accept that risk, then you should not undertake the endeavor. When they found out what a pain in the butt, it was going to be to operate it. They should of learned from their mistakes, retired the fleet, and used what they had learned to build a new fleet that avoided what they had problems with in the original shuttle. But they was unwilling to admit they had made a mistake, and they pressed ahead. To date, they have spent over a 100 billion for a little over 100 flights. With the most of the cost being in the operation and maintenance of the craft. It would be like spending $50,000 for a big car, and having to put $10,000 worth of maintenance and gas into it, every time you drive it to town. I don't care how much you like the car, after a little while, you are going to be looking for a new car. The person that bought the car has to admit to his self, that he just made a mistake, and live with that fact. Trying to keep the car running will cost you more in the long run, than just driving it into the ditch, forgetting about it, and buying a new little one that will get to town on just a $100 a trip. There was a couple single stage to orbit, and two stage to orbit spacecraft that was contenders for the first generation spacecraft. But NASA said that it had to have about 10 to 20% more payload capacity than those designs allowed. That is why they went with the space shuttle. To me, that seemed stupid. I will refer to the example above. A big car that takes $10,000 to drive it to town. Yes, you can take everything you need in one trip. But I think I will stick with the small one that takes $100 a trip and make two trips. Some people get mad when you say the shuttle should be retired. They say "Look at it's reliability rating. It's as good as any out there." Yes, the reliability ratting of it's systems is the bet out there, bar none. They have tweaked it to extreme perfection. So, even with it's level of complexity, it leads to a total flight record that is quite good. But that misses the point. The inherent design of the shuttle has almost no robustness against mechanical failure. You have to have quad redundancy, and layer up on layer of safeties to prevent an electrical problem from causing total loss of crew and craft. And when a major mechanical component breaks then no amount of electrical and control redundancy will help. The matching of solid rocket boosters to liquid rockets is a tentative situation at best. One is impossible to shut off. Once you light it, you have to keep everything running, or you will end up in a uncontrollable situation. The other is a system that sometimes likes to quit on it's own. If you can not shut off, or throttle back all the other boosters to maintain an even course for aborting the mission, then you will end up in a bad situation. The basic design of the shuttle leads to an "all or nothing" situation. A system like that is not a viable platform for day to day operations. A platform for day to day operations has to be a robust failure tolerant system. Failure in any part of the system, excluding heat shield, manual control, and total power buss failure, should be a recoverable situation, that will lead to the safe return of craft and crew. Or at bare minimum, the survival of the crew, excluding a few broken bones. Systems like that are already in existence in plane and rocket form. Some go after the Soyuz for it's close calls. Those people just make me shake my head in disbelief. The just don't get it. Even with the horrible quality control, and bad leadership that has been forced on that poor craft, it's safety record is only exceeded by the space shuttle. It has withstood failures that would have caused the complete loss of the space shuttle. With the only damage to the crew being a few frayed nerves and a sore back. If you subjected the level of quality control to the space shuttle, that has been bestowed to the Soyuz crafts, you would have no shuttles left to fly. If you applied the level of care to a Soyuz class fleet, that has been spent of the shuttle, then you may have had a few accidents, but I am pretty sure that the operational death toll figure would resemble a good old ZERO right now. The only critical systems is the manual thruster/system control, integrity of the control/decent sphere, the heat shield on that sphere, and parachute. All of the rest can literally blow up and the crew will survive. That isn't just a guess, it's proven fact. Another style of ship would also fit the realm of robust, failure tolerant design is a horizontal takeoff space plane design. Especially a SSTO design. Lets look at that field of operation. Avionics controls have already been built to very reliable standards. If it uses jet/ramjet/scramjet engines, and one fails at any point in it's operation, then it can still operate on the others to return to the landing site. If all of the fails, then it can still glide back to the landing site, or make a crash landing in a field or highway if needed. It one or all the liquid rocket engines fail to start when it starts it's rocket phase, then it can just shut all them off, go back to jet power, and return to base. If one or both fails in mid burn, then it can just make a soft reentry and return to base. The only critical portions of the craft would be heat shield integrity, Flight control operation, structural integrity of the flight surfaces, and fuel tank integrity. You would have no external threats to the aircraft during launch. Since the total size of the returning spaceship will be it's original starting size, but just empty of fuel. Density of the returning aircraft will be less, so external heating will be a lot lower. You will have no need for fragile ceramic tiles like the shuttle has. There is no failure of any engine system that could lead to an unrecoverable situation. Even if and engine failed in the operating condition, you could just make circles until you burnt off the fuel, and then you could come back home. The X33 looked promising. All though, it wasn't as failure tolerant as a horizontal takeoff aircraft, it was still a lot better than the space shuttle. To this day, I don't know why they dropped it. The promise that it displayed was far beyond any problems that I seen listed. Yes, they where going to have to switch to aluminum fuel takes, and that would cut down on it's payload a bit. That would mean that it would not be an "exact" replacement for the shuttle, but that would have been perfectly acceptable. I guess that they thought that if it was built, and proven far cheaper to fly, they would have no arguable reason to use the space shuttle any more, except for the extreme conditions where they needed that extra 10% payload capacity. And they knew that the rarity of that was so little that they would have no excuse to continue supporting the shuttle fleet. Yes they wouldn't have a spacecraft that could transport as large of a piece as they can now, but the fact that you could make two or three, or more trips for every one that you made now, would make up for that plus some. That's NASA, shooting themselves in the foot, in spite of themselves. When I heard bush lay out his new policy for space exploration, I said "finally, they will get a chance to do things right. Both proposals look promising. But when I seen the plan that they accepted, I generally got the idea that the NASA is a all around masochistic organization. To purposefully inflict that much harm on yourself, you have to enjoy it. The shuttle derived design. Lets look at it. All right, we take a horrible design and build on it. It can't be that bad right?... Wrong!!!!!! Lets take the worst part of the worst design and use that for the primary part of the rocket. That being the SRB. Lets take and stick a little second stage, and capsule on top of that. Man that would be a hell of a ride. Two boosters shake the shuttle stack so bad that it feels like a continuous car crash. Think of how bad it would shake when you don't have the mass of the shuttle and external tank to restrain it. Please, a kerosene/LOX stage, or something, but not solid!!!!!! Once it's lit, you can't shut it off. The jettison rocket on the top of the capsule will have to be able to exceed the acceleration of the booster before it will be able to pull away from the lower stage, in an abort maneuver. The image of the booster doing a flip, and heading straight for the ground comes into mind. The capsule jettison rocket would launch the capsule right at the ground, followed up by an out of control booster. It brings new meaning to the term "Getting the shaft." Then we have the heavy lift design with the two SRB's and the ET. All right, lets leave out the only part that has never been the primary cause of total shuttle destruction, and lets build upon the only two parts that has been the cause of total shuttle destruction. That sounds logical doesn't it? The president is giving them the funding they need, but the people running the place is just a collective group of morons with masochistic tendencies. The should retire the shuttle fleet, and make this last flight, the last one ever. Then take all the money that they spend on operating the shuttle and put it into building a new spacecraft. $5 billion a year for two years should be able to turn out one or two small fully reusable spacecraft by the end of the second year. Heck, if they would have taken that action when the last shuttle exploded, we probably would already have a couple replacement spacecraft to put into service. Yes, they would probably only be able to carry 10,000 to 20,000 pounds, but they would be able to supply the space station for basic requirement, and have a turnaround time of less than 24 hours. That equipment would give you the information and experience needed to build bigger spacecraft. All the money that they save would could be used to build bigger craft that could haul the larger equipment up to the station to complete it a couple years later. Sticking with the space shuttle is costing everyone more money, and producing less results than if they just parked them in a hanger and forgot about them. If you terminate the shuttle program, all those companies that depend upon supplying overpriced services and parts to the shuttle will cease to exist, but it's better for the future of the space program. The only thing that the designers incorporated into the space shuttle was job security. Some would say that there is no way that you could build a space plane in two to three years. They built the Apollo stack in 4 years. Surly, with all this modern stuff, we should be able to build a little plane that is smaller than the first stage booster on the Apollo missions, in two years. Just make a design, and build it full size. Flight test it in it's atmospheric envelop first. Outfit it with it's rocket system, and bring it up to the edge of space and start doing puddle jumps. Work your way up until you are doing full orbits. Work the design bugs out, and then build more of them. You don't have to look very far for design ideas. There was plenty that predated the space shuttle. Research indicated they were feasible with 1960 technology. The only reason they picked the current space shuttle over them was the fact that they did not offer the exact payload capacity that they wanted. With modern technology they should be a piece of cake to build. And cost far less to operate than the space shuttle. Heck, look at the SR71. 5X the speed of sound, on the edge of space. Just strap a rocket engine on it, and replace a little bit of it's fuel tanks with LOX tanks, and it would easily reach sub orbital or even orbital velocity. You would have to work on a heat shield though. I wouldn't want NASA to run a war. When they moved the troops over to the battle field, they would say, "The C5 galaxy design does not meet requirements. We want a plane that will carry all 100,000 troops, plus all support equipment, and all supplies to last them two years, at the same time." Yes that size of plane could be built, but it would be the size of New York, and it will cost 100 X the amount to deliver the troops than it will using a C5 galaxy making hundreds of trips. I still had a little bit of hope in NASA. But after I seen the shuttle derived design, I lost that last little bit of hope. |
#2
|
|||
|
|||
On Wed, 10 Aug 2005 07:56:16 GMT, in sci.space.shuttle you wrote:
My opinions about the shuttle change from day to day, depending on what I see NASA using it for, and what their other non shuttle plans appear to be. Over the years, I have grown pragmatic over the whole situation. When I look at the other designs for the shuttle that was considered when it was built. Ones presented by other manufacturers. It sometime leaves me wondering why we are stuck with the current one to this day. It was marketed as a first generation space plane. Something that would be easy and cheap to maintain. It also had bragging rights over a low initial price tag. Even though it would have a slightly more expensive "per launch" cost. So they ordered 5 of them plus the enterprise for testing. Price tag was 30 and some odd billion dollars. Now, here comes the maintenance part. There is problem with space shuttle. You don't have a manufacturers warranty. When one is destroyed, you can't just turn in an insurance claim, and get a new one. Maintenance is a purely "do it yourself" type of affair. There is no "Online space shuttle consumer reviews website" to look at, to see which one is the best one to buy. So, when you pick a design, you may end up with a totally unusable piece of equipment. That is just a risk you accept from the beginning. If you are unable to accept that risk, then you should not undertake the endeavor. When they found out what a pain in the butt, it was going to be to operate it. They should of learned from their mistakes, retired the fleet, and used what they had learned to build a new fleet that avoided what they had problems with in the original shuttle. But they was unwilling to admit they had made a mistake, and they pressed ahead. To date, they have spent over a 100 billion for a little over 100 flights. With the most of the cost being in the operation and maintenance of the craft. It would be like spending $50,000 for a big car, and having to put $10,000 worth of maintenance and gas into it, every time you drive it to town. I don't care how much you like the car, after a little while, you are going to be looking for a new car. The person that bought the car has to admit to his self, that he just made a mistake, and live with that fact. Trying to keep the car running will cost you more in the long run, than just driving it into the ditch, forgetting about it, and buying a new little one that will get to town on just a $100 a trip. There was a couple single stage to orbit, and two stage to orbit spacecraft that was contenders for the first generation spacecraft. But NASA said that it had to have about 10 to 20% more payload capacity than those designs allowed. That is why they went with the space shuttle. To me, that seemed stupid. I will refer to the example above. A big car that takes $10,000 to drive it to town. Yes, you can take everything you need in one trip. But I think I will stick with the small one that takes $100 a trip and make two trips. Some people get mad when you say the shuttle should be retired. They say "Look at it's reliability rating. It's as good as any out there." Yes, the reliability ratting of it's systems is the bet out there, bar none. They have tweaked it to extreme perfection. So, even with it's level of complexity, it leads to a total flight record that is quite good. But that misses the point. The inherent design of the shuttle has almost no robustness against mechanical failure. You have to have quad redundancy, and layer up on layer of safeties to prevent an electrical problem from causing total loss of crew and craft. And when a major mechanical component breaks then no amount of electrical and control redundancy will help. The matching of solid rocket boosters to liquid rockets is a tentative situation at best. One is impossible to shut off. Once you light it, you have to keep everything running, or you will end up in a uncontrollable situation. The other is a system that sometimes likes to quit on it's own. If you can not shut off, or throttle back all the other boosters to maintain an even course for aborting the mission, then you will end up in a bad situation. The basic design of the shuttle leads to an "all or nothing" situation. A system like that is not a viable platform for day to day operations. A platform for day to day operations has to be a robust failure tolerant system. Failure in any part of the system, excluding heat shield, manual control, and total power buss failure, should be a recoverable situation, that will lead to the safe return of craft and crew. Or at bare minimum, the survival of the crew, excluding a few broken bones. Systems like that are already in existence in plane and rocket form. Some go after the Soyuz for it's close calls. Those people just make me shake my head in disbelief. The just don't get it. Even with the horrible quality control, and bad leadership that has been forced on that poor craft, it's safety record is only exceeded by the space shuttle. It has withstood failures that would have caused the complete loss of the space shuttle. With the only damage to the crew being a few frayed nerves and a sore back. If you subjected the level of quality control to the space shuttle, that has been bestowed to the Soyuz crafts, you would have no shuttles left to fly. If you applied the level of care to a Soyuz class fleet, that has been spent of the shuttle, then you may have had a few accidents, but I am pretty sure that the operational death toll figure would resemble a good old ZERO right now. The only critical systems is the manual thruster/system control, integrity of the control/decent sphere, the heat shield on that sphere, and parachute. All of the rest can literally blow up and the crew will survive. That isn't just a guess, it's proven fact. Another style of ship would also fit the realm of robust, failure tolerant design is a horizontal takeoff space plane design. Especially a SSTO design. Lets look at that field of operation. Avionics controls have already been built to very reliable standards. If it uses jet/ramjet/scramjet engines, and one fails at any point in it's operation, then it can still operate on the others to return to the landing site. If all of the fails, then it can still glide back to the landing site, or make a crash landing in a field or highway if needed. It one or all the liquid rocket engines fail to start when it starts it's rocket phase, then it can just shut all them off, go back to jet power, and return to base. If one or both fails in mid burn, then it can just make a soft reentry and return to base. The only critical portions of the craft would be heat shield integrity, Flight control operation, structural integrity of the flight surfaces, and fuel tank integrity. You would have no external threats to the aircraft during launch. Since the total size of the returning spaceship will be it's original starting size, but just empty of fuel. Density of the returning aircraft will be less, so external heating will be a lot lower. You will have no need for fragile ceramic tiles like the shuttle has. There is no failure of any engine system that could lead to an unrecoverable situation. Even if and engine failed in the operating condition, you could just make circles until you burnt off the fuel, and then you could come back home. The X33 looked promising. All though, it wasn't as failure tolerant as a horizontal takeoff aircraft, it was still a lot better than the space shuttle. To this day, I don't know why they dropped it. The promise that it displayed was far beyond any problems that I seen listed. Yes, they where going to have to switch to aluminum fuel takes, and that would cut down on it's payload a bit. That would mean that it would not be an "exact" replacement for the shuttle, but that would have been perfectly acceptable. I guess that they thought that if it was built, and proven far cheaper to fly, they would have no arguable reason to use the space shuttle any more, except for the extreme conditions where they needed that extra 10% payload capacity. And they knew that the rarity of that was so little that they would have no excuse to continue supporting the shuttle fleet. Yes they wouldn't have a spacecraft that could transport as large of a piece as they can now, but the fact that you could make two or three, or more trips for every one that you made now, would make up for that plus some. That's NASA, shooting themselves in the foot, in spite of themselves. When I heard bush lay out his new policy for space exploration, I said "finally, they will get a chance to do things right. Both proposals look promising. But when I seen the plan that they accepted, I generally got the idea that the NASA is a all around masochistic organization. To purposefully inflict that much harm on yourself, you have to enjoy it. The shuttle derived design. Lets look at it. All right, we take a horrible design and build on it. It can't be that bad right?... Wrong!!!!!! Lets take the worst part of the worst design and use that for the primary part of the rocket. That being the SRB. Lets take and stick a little second stage, and capsule on top of that. Man that would be a hell of a ride. Two boosters shake the shuttle stack so bad that it feels like a continuous car crash. Think of how bad it would shake when you don't have the mass of the shuttle and external tank to restrain it. Please, a kerosene/LOX stage, or something, but not solid!!!!!! Once it's lit, you can't shut it off. The jettison rocket on the top of the capsule will have to be able to exceed the acceleration of the booster before it will be able to pull away from the lower stage, in an abort maneuver. The image of the booster doing a flip, and heading straight for the ground comes into mind. The capsule jettison rocket would launch the capsule right at the ground, followed up by an out of control booster. It brings new meaning to the term "Getting the shaft." Then we have the heavy lift design with the two SRB's and the ET. All right, lets leave out the only part that has never been the primary cause of total shuttle destruction, and lets build upon the only two parts that has been the cause of total shuttle destruction. That sounds logical doesn't it? The president is giving them the funding they need, but the people running the place is just a collective group of morons with masochistic tendencies. The should retire the shuttle fleet, and make this last flight, the last one ever. Then take all the money that they spend on operating the shuttle and put it into building a new spacecraft. $5 billion a year for two years should be able to turn out one or two small fully reusable spacecraft by the end of the second year. Heck, if they would have taken that action when the last shuttle exploded, we probably would already have a couple replacement spacecraft to put into service. Yes, they would probably only be able to carry 10,000 to 20,000 pounds, but they would be able to supply the space station for basic requirement, and have a turnaround time of less than 24 hours. That equipment would give you the information and experience needed to build bigger spacecraft. All the money that they save would could be used to build bigger craft that could haul the larger equipment up to the station to complete it a couple years later. Sticking with the space shuttle is costing everyone more money, and producing less results than if they just parked them in a hanger and forgot about them. If you terminate the shuttle program, all those companies that depend upon supplying overpriced services and parts to the shuttle will cease to exist, but it's better for the future of the space program. The only thing that the designers incorporated into the space shuttle was job security. Some would say that there is no way that you could build a space plane in two to three years. They built the Apollo stack in 4 years. Surly, with all this modern stuff, we should be able to build a little plane that is smaller than the first stage booster on the Apollo missions, in two years. Just make a design, and build it full size. Flight test it in it's atmospheric envelop first. Outfit it with it's rocket system, and bring it up to the edge of space and start doing puddle jumps. Work your way up until you are doing full orbits. Work the design bugs out, and then build more of them. You don't have to look very far for design ideas. There was plenty that predated the space shuttle. Research indicated they were feasible with 1960 technology. The only reason they picked the current space shuttle over them was the fact that they did not offer the exact payload capacity that they wanted. With modern technology they should be a piece of cake to build. And cost far less to operate than the space shuttle. Heck, look at the SR71. 5X the speed of sound, on the edge of space. Just strap a rocket engine on it, and replace a little bit of it's fuel tanks with LOX tanks, and it would easily reach sub orbital or even orbital velocity. You would have to work on a heat shield though. I wouldn't want NASA to run a war. When they moved the troops over to the battle field, they would say, "The C5 galaxy design does not meet requirements. We want a plane that will carry all 100,000 troops, plus all support equipment, and all supplies to last them two years, at the same time." Yes that size of plane could be built, but it would be the size of New York, and it will cost 100 X the amount to deliver the troops than it will using a C5 galaxy making hundreds of trips. I still had a little bit of hope in NASA. But after I seen the shuttle derived design, I lost that last little bit of hope. I sympathise, but the shuttle was a start at least, and came about for various reasons at the time in the prevailing circumstances with knowledge at hand. Seems to be a miracle that anything emerged from the back of a cig packet to production. The Shuttle is cute, at least.. but with incredible advancements in CAD and fluid dynamics modelling, Shuttle II could be made in a much shorter timescale, but in parallel. The station must still be completed, be able to be serviced, and prepared to act as a spaceport and fuel depot for Moon and Mars and other missions. However, the budget money is meaningless... it goes into the economy, gives a lot of people a lot to do with their time, gives them money to spend on things that give others jobs and it all goes back to the government in taxes to be spent again anyway, and so on... They all do something very worthwhile in the process... Knowledge and technology progresses, lessons get learnt, lives get fulfilled, we get something exciting to follow and discuss and we all get a little wiser... Considering that 100 billion a year is spent on unnecessary food by fat Americans and 30 billion a year spent on dieting, 16 billion a year on NASA is peanuts, so it should be possible to advance Shuttle's replacement with a more capable and safer craft. Put the orbiter on top of the EFT, and the SSMEs on the EFT instead and more payload can be carried... just the ground hardware will have to be taller... Also, 4 or 6 SRBs could be used and jettisoned in sequence for greater lift. The replacement orbiter might not need to be so radically different. Andy. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Haveland-Robinson Associates Tel. +36 30 223 2158 Budapest, Hungary Web: http://www.haveland.com |
#3
|
|||
|
|||
On Fri, 12 Aug 2005 13:28:16 +0200, Andy wrote:
Considering that 100 billion a year is spent on unnecessary food by fat Americans and 30 billion a year spent on dieting, 16 billion a year on NASA is peanuts, so it should be possible to advance Shuttle's replacement with a more capable and safer craft. Maybe we should all be required to be weighed as we file our income tax returns. Really fat and really skinny people are forced to pay a surcharge. It could become the "beyond" part of "to the Moon, Mars and beyond". Well, it's better than Mondale's "I'm gonna raise your taxes!" idea Dale |
Thread Tools | |
Display Modes | |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
Shuttle News from 1976 | Gareth Slee | History | 0 | August 1st 05 09:19 PM |
JimO writings on shuttle disaster, recovery | Jim Oberg | Policy | 0 | July 11th 05 06:32 PM |
Unofficial Space Shuttle Manifest | Steven S. Pietrobon | Space Shuttle | 0 | June 4th 04 02:55 AM |
Unofficial Space Shuttle Manifest | Steven S. Pietrobon | Space Shuttle | 2 | February 2nd 04 10:55 AM |