ISS Irony

Got to throw in my 0.02 x local currency unit, I guess...

A small, relatively cheap, and possibly even single-use man-rated carrier could have gotten a repair crew up to Hubble's orbit. If they needed more stuff up there, then the classic big dumb rocket could get the repair parts in place much more cheaply than the Shuttle ever could have.

The marriage of a heavy-lift cargo carrier to a crew cabin was a neat hack but having separate high-G cargo trucks and low-G man-rated crew carriers seems to make a lot more sense.

We could have learned everything we needed to know with just one shuttle, not four. Was there any plan to launch more than one at a time? The replacement (after one blew up) was totally unnecessary as well.

What did we learn from the shuttle and the ISS? That space is an extremely hostile and dangerous place for humans, and that there's not much for them to do once we get them up there? We knew that already.

Think of all the science and robotics and stuff we could have done with all those dollars and people.

We are not going to reach the stars with chemical rockets. We probably won't put men on Mars, nor should we. There's no reason to go back to the moon. Spam in a can in low earth orbit is a stairway to nowhere.

Divide four light-years by 173 miles to get an idea of the difficulty.

John

The USAF actually killed the shuttle.

The USAF requirement was to return huge loads (like the MOL) several tons back from LEO requiring a 1000 km east/west gliding capability (once around). No other service needed such return capability.

Liquid-fuel thrusters are ubiquitous in satellites and spacecraft. Hypergolic fuel has its own problems, but it is used. Hell, anything with enough energy to be useful is dangerous.

Except for time. Though the Hubble had spares.

Yes. Also, one was originally intended to be DOD (Air Force) only.

Politics and image. Cheap enough at only a couple of $B. Obama will spend more than that on the links before his term is up.

They were thinking of as many as sixty flights per year (down from original rosy projections of 250-300 per year) [1] with a life of ~100 missions per shuttle, so they would have needed lots of shuttles. If the program lasted 10 years at 60/year it would have required 6 shuttles. In 1972 they settled on a projection of 580 flights total over 12 years (1979-1990).

Only six were built (Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavour) and only the latter five ended up being spaceworthy.

Uwe Hercksen wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.dfncis.de:

We gain valuable experience in repairing things in space,and with a shuttle,we can bring old satellites back to Earth,not leaving debris in orbit or having to deorbit and burn them up in the atmosphere,with the risk that a piece might land somewhere unintended or the entire satellite skip and make a bad reentry.Plus,we get to examine a satellite after it served a long time in the space environment,gaining more valuable knowledge,to benefit the next designs.

Liquid propellants yield very light (average molecular mass) exhaust gases which are very inefficient at low flight velocities - they carry away too much kinetic energy (1/2 M V^2) for too little impulse. That's why the SRBs are used during low-speed (

is

That's once a week.

That's almost every day.

For those estimates, they were thinking about space wars against our imaginary enemies. I don't know what was the actual fight frequency, but probably not more than once a month.

The probability, per sortie, of killing a shuttle crew vastly exceeds the probability of a satellite re-entry hurting someone on the ground. History confirms that, 14 to nothing.

John

No, the specific impulse of the SRBs is 269s vs 316s for the SSMEs. It was too difficult/expensive to scale the SSMEs further.

That's the most I've heard. The more realistic estimate, at the time, was

You're an idiot. You say something more stupid than previous with every post you make.

You numbers are off on the money, and the lives lost in our entire space program are very low, with the shuttle mission percentages even less than that of the Apollo series, and ALLbeing far less than that of the Russians.

You are clueless both about what NASA spent, and what it did for the nation and the world, for that matter.

Essentially, you know as much about space, and the space program as you do about your degreasing machine. That number borders on nil.

You're an idiot.

It would not even pay for one.

And you are so stupid that you declare that I cannot "do math".

You cannot "see reality". At least not any better than Hulk Hogan's son. You need your own "realality" TV show! Bwuahahahahaha!

Oh yeah, like that would have been cheap and successful on the first try.

It would have cost more than it did to send men.

You are a complete and utter retard, Larkin.

Tried the dollar-bill magnet thing yet?

John

So, you are blind to all the tech that the world uses now as a result of NASA R&D?

You really are dumb. You name should be John "in the dark" Darkin (not Larkin).

Not that either should remain part of the gene pool.