Re: Space Shuttle Grounding....depressing....

On Wed, 17 Aug 2005 10:13:48 +0000 (UTC), Iain Rae
<iainr@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Josh Hill wrote:

>> But we aren't learning anything new from the ISS -- as things now
>> stand, it's a project in search of a reason, teaching us nothing we
>> don't already know about long-term stays in space, adding no
>> scientific knowledge that couldn't be done more cheaply through other
>> means, and, well, not being particularly exciting to those not
>> directly involved.
>
>But that's because it's currently operating with a crew of two rather
>than the seven it was designed for. Since they spend most of their time
>keeping the station running it's not surprising that they're not doing a
>lot of science. At the moment there's one laboratory module up there,
>there are five scheduled to be launched between now and 2010, some of
>them have been sitting in storage waiting for the shuttle to return to
>flight.

>It's like running a cruise liner with just enough crew to keep the ships
>systems running and half the passenger accomodation still being built
>then wondering why the passengers are complaining that the level of
>service is terrible.

But did those experiments require a large space station and a crew, or
could most of them have been done more economically with unmanned
operations or smaller-scale human operations?

>If you want to get cheap to orbit craft then the best way to do that is
>to get industry interested in going there. Look at the drop in cost in
>satellite launches when the telecoms industry got into communications
>satellites in a big way. To do that you have to show them that there's
>something that can be done more cheaply in LEO, or that can only be done
>there.

Industry was interested in the SSTO, but the programs were cancelled.
They're probably too expensive at this point for private enterprise to
take on without government funding.

I don't think it's easy to come up with economically viable things to
do in space at the current level of knowledge and technology.
Communications satellites and the like, but they rarely require human
intervention. Space tourism may be a good bet in the short term, but
launch prices will have to come down and that's not likely to happen
without the SSTO. And high speed planetary transportation -- that
program was cut too.

>> The shuttle is much more expensive to fly than conventional vehicles,
>> and will never be as safe or as reliable. The safest arrangement right
>> now seems to be a conventional booster with an escape tower, which
>> allows the mission to be aborted at any point.
>
>No, I don't think that's quite right, with apollo the escape tower could
>only be used in the early part of the launch, until just after the first
>stage had been jettisoned, after that you're into doing the same kind of
> "drop things and maneuver the spacecraft" abort modes that the shuttle has.

My phrasing was ambiguous. That will still be true --the point I was
trying to make is that there will be abort capability throughout the
flight.

--
Josh

"You know I could run for governor but I'm basically
a media creation. I've never done anything. I've
worked for my dad. I worked in the oil business. But
that's not the kind of profile you have to have
to get elected to public office." - George W. Bush

.

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