Live coverage of the last Shuttle launch (STS-135, Atlantis)
nasa.gov
nasa.gov
I was there as a boy standing against the wire fence with my father to see this amazing machine. Bloody marvellous!
The shuttle may well have been too expensive, too dangerous and too limited in capabilities. But to me as a simple enthusiast it's still a truly glorious machine that would be sad to see go even with a better replacement on the next pad. Without that....
One day, we will return.
After this last mission, the U.S. manned space program's capabilities will be back in the 1950s.
Perhaps it did hurt more than it helped, in that it made the phrase you use, "routine low orbit missions" not sound ludicrous. Perhaps it was all just a massively expensive house of cards one gentle breeze away from failure, and on the occasions it did fail, people were surprised. We've only been sending people to space for fifty years, there's still nothing "routine" about low earth orbit, and every astronaut that has died in a shuttle knew exactly the risks they were taking.
My greatest hope is that the retirement of the remaining shuttles won't be seen by Americans (and the world in general) as a failure or a "sign of the times", but will be a rallying point. It's time to move on to bigger and better things.
That is the damaging legacy of STS. It's established the expectation that going to orbit can never be done at a reasonable price, that there will never be anything people can do in space worth the staggering cost of getting them there.
Getting to orbit could be routine, but we been marinating in expensive failure for so long the engineering that needs to be done to make it happen will never get public support in the US.
The last flight of the shuttle is a huge step in the right direction, historically so, not a regression. I respect it for what it did, but the best thing it could do now is retire with honor and dignity.
Where is that profit going to come from? Space tourism? I will be very surprised if there will be a big ongoing demand for spending a few days vomiting in an orbiting can.
You clearly underestimate the desire of the average American to make himself severely uncomfortable for the sake of a thrill. At the current level of expense, space tourism will never be more than a status symbol for the super rich, but get the cost bellow a few thousand dollars and add a few amenities to the experience and people will go hog wild for it.
From providing services that are already being paid for, only for lower costs? Which generally has the effect of growing the economy in question?
You are aware that there already is a space industry, right? Private companies paying real money to put real satellites up for various reasons? It doesn't take much Microeconomics 101 to think that dropping the cost to launch by a factor of four will tend to grow the already-existing economy. Skepticism about whether a viable space economy can exist at all is too late, that ship has sailed.
Cheaper space access will enable more economic activity in existing domains, will enable new types of activities that aren't currently viable, and historically speaking, it's pretty safe to say that trying to guess in advance what will ultimately be the "killer app" is actually pretty hard, but given the existence of an already-viable economy it's more a matter of waiting and seeing than hoping.
"Only fifty years", indeed.
As far as manned spaceflight, it's certainly fundamentally more difficult than air travel but that doesn't explain the lack of progress the last 5 decades have seen under NASA leadership. Indeed, we're already seeing the first fruits of a properly open and competitive launch industry, something that hasn't generally been possible for most of the last half century, and it is already beginning to revolutionize manned spaceflight. In the next 50 years if the industry keeps advancing they will have developed streamlined mass produced launch vehicles (Iridium proved that such a thing was possible for satellites, at massive cost savings), single stage to orbit vehicles, and truly reusable launch vehicles, all of which will ultimately bring manned spaceflight into the reach of ordinary folks.
As to reducing the cost to orbit. The shuttle could transport 50 people into orbit with some minor retrofitting in the cargo area. However, there is little reason to have done so because there is vary little demand to send people into orbit. When you get down to it much of the cost of the shuttle program is trying to maximize the utility of old hardware while minimizing risks. If you want cheap you need to set minor R&D improvements aside and focus on volume but there is just not enough demand to really reduce costs.
*AKA They included things like fuel surcharges, baggage handling fees, average trip length, and quality of service etc.
Can you really call it "routine"? The first 135 plane/car trips were probably pretty dangerous, too.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fo8v7juSgRw#t=54m55s
"The machine is a beautiful, wonderful piece of hardware. The orbiter system, the most complex system ever built by man to fly has never [...] had a failure that would have prevented that machine from landing safely."
- Borrowing from Peggy Noonan, Aaron Sorkin & John Magee
Things like kUSD or M$ appear to have come from science - it's putting an SI prefix to a unit. Personally, when I write M$, I mean one megadollar, not 1 milion dollars.
Oh, I always thought that you write a numeral before the dollar sign... Thanks for pointing that out. It differs between currencies - for example, british pounds are written before numeral (£42), but polish złoty are written after (42zł).
Billion in USD in the United States is 10^9.
Gigadollars is a made-up SI-ified term in the US
G is short for grand, like "that car costs 100G's" for a $100,000 car, making it further unacceptable.
Long story short, to be most easily understood, it's a good idea to use the vernacular of the area
[edit: changed asterisk-asterisk to ^. Apparently two adjacent *'s aren't recognized]
The most depressing realization comes from comparing our actions between the Apollo days & now. As a response to Sputnik, this country managed to go from an insignificant investment in space to putting a man on the moon, and we did it in just over a decade.
Today? We don't seem to pay attention to these challenges.
As marvelous as the shuttles are, they are just an expensive way to go knee deep in space. LEO is boring because we already went much further. Let's set foot on the Moon once again, and launch from there (using local materials is a good excuse) to Mars and the outer planets.
Imagine how big a telescope could be with the lower gravity and how crisp its image with no atmosphere to disturb it or absorb parts of the spectrum. Or a radio telescope shielded (by the Moon) from Earth's radio emissions. And, if something broke, someone would dress up and drive there to take a look instead of taking a year of planning and a billion-dollar mission to, maybe, fix it.
So while it is the passing of an era, with the ISS at the sharp point of manned space flight, I'm not about to let nostalgia cloud the objective fact that it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the stars.
[edit] But that's not to imply that shuttle launches aren't really cool.
On this, I disagree. Flying in an even older device (Soyuz) provided at a ridiculous rate from a "business partner" (calling Russia an ally is not quite accurate) is not the way we should be letting ourselves get into space.
I know the shuttle is far from perfect, but we should have had the Dragon or Orion capsule ready before shuttle retirement.
Turn off some air conditioners and get out of a few wars, and we could have easily kept going strong.
Soyuz 1 (1967) and Soyuz 11 (1971) both ended with fatalities. Four cosmonauts died. The Soviet Union did not hide those fatalities. Here is what best illustrates that: All their names are on the Fallen Astronaut memorial on the Moon, put there during Apollo 15, only a month after Soyuz 11 ended in disaster.
There have been no fatalities on Soyuz flights since Soyuz 11, all fatalities occurred early on. That’s forty years without fatalities, and that’s mostly why Soyuz is so safe and reliable.
Sure, more astronauts died during Space Shuttle missions but the Space Shuttle also brought many more astronauts into space than Soyuz. If you look at the percentage of fatalities Soyuz is only doing marginally better – one more dead cosmonaut and the percentages would be about the same. It’s not so much the raw numbers, it’s the forty years. Soyuz is a mature spacecraft, all the kinks have been worked out, the Space Shuttle was always too complicated to ever really work out the kinks, to ever really be considered safe.
It would be interesting to see some rationale for this position besides the implied jingoism.
Anybody have an actual time when that's supposed to happen?
(edited to correct the time, I was out by an hour)
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/news/releases/2011/relea...
I'm hoping that the privatization of the space programs (like SpaceX or Virgin Galatic) gets enough interest to fuel more funding and research into space travel though only a handful of rich folks could ever pay for a ride in one of those programs ...
The shuttle, cool as it is, is a money drain. All but one of its mission profiles can be fulfilled by cheaper vehicles.
Hopefully, mankind will continue the exploration of space...
Time to focus on our next space endeavors.
"The countdown has entered a 45-minute hold at T-9 minutes."
Given SpaceX's record, it might happen sooner than you think.
http://www.spacex.com/updates.php http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/01/elon-musk-s...
I know at first this seems like a big and very risky and very uncertain change. But it's not: The private sector aerospace companies have been engineering and building our spacecraft all along^. This is evolutionary, incremental.
LEO is a solved problem now. By letting the private sector take over this tier, it frees NASA to work on advancing the science and state-of-the-art of further exploration.
^ Yes, of course NASA engineers were in the drivers seat, especially in engineering the systems, with private companies focusing on particular components. But my larger point of evolution v. revolution is the context I was getting at.
+/- 2 mins
EASTERN: 10:40 am CENTRAL: 9:40 am PACIFIC: 7:40 am
Soyuz[1], the Russian spacecraft, will continue bringing and returning people to and from the ISS (three each – seven is a typical Space Shuttle crew). Two Soyuz will continue to be permanently docked to the ISS (they will, of course, be regularly switched out whenever a new Soyuz flies to the ISS) and serve as lifeboats for the ISS’s crew of six. They are actually the limiting factor for the crew size – an evacuation of everyone on the ISS has to be possible at all times.
Soyuz will be the only spacecraft that can return something to Earth after the Shuttle retires. Since it’s designed to fly people and not cargo it’s certainly easy to imagine that Soyuz is far from ideal for this job – forget bringing back any big experiments.
Progress[2] is the unmanned cargo version of Soyuz. It will continue bringing cargo to the ISS. (Two to three tons per flight. The shuttle could bring about 25 tons to low earth orbit.) It’s, just like Soyuz, a very capable and reliable work horse. (It was the only spacecraft bringing cargo to the ISS when the Shuttles were grounded between 2003 and 2005.)
There are two other and newer cargo spacecraft: The European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV[3]) and the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV[4]). The ATV automatically (like its name indicates) docks to the Russian part of the ISS and can bring up more than seven tons of cargo. It can also boost the station into a higher orbit (as is regularly necessary). The second ATV Johannes Kepler only recently successfully finished its mission, was filled with trash, undocked and burned up in the atmosphere.
The HTV can bring about six tons of cargo to the ISS. It has a pressurized and an unpressurized cargo section (meaning anything that’s supposed to be attached somewhere outside the ISS doesn’t have to go through and fit through the airlock, it can be brought to the ISS in the unpressurized cargo section). It has no complicated automated approach system like the ATV, it is simply grappled by the Canadian “robot” arm (well, it’s more a crane than a robot, really[5]) and attached to the American part of the ISS. Since it’s docking to the American part of the station, the docking hatch is large enough to accommodate International Standard Payload Racks[6] which are used everywhere in the non-Russian part of the ISS. The ATV can’t bring those racks to the ISS since it docks to the Russian part of the station (and their hatches are too small). The HTV also only recently successfully finished its second mission and burned up in the atmosphere.
That’s the current situation, I will leave it to someone else to explain what the future might hold (SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, for example). Bringing cargo back from the ISS is the only real problem, there will only be Soyuz after the Shuttle retires.
The ISS can currently also not be extended, well, at least not the non-Russion part. Bringing up all the modules was a job the Shuttle was perfectly suited for. That’s no problem since the ISS is done. They actually managed to pretty much complete it, even looking at the original plans. Heck, even the Cupola[7] made it.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_(spacecraft)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progress_spacecraft
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_Transfer_Vehicle
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-II_Transfer_Vehicle
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm2
[6] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Standard_Payload_...