Killing The Space Shuttle
Okay guys, a Venezuela post is on its way. In the meantime, with all the talk about the space shuttle, I haven’t noticed many people pointing out the fact that the shuttle is a mostly worthless hunk of shit. Granted, it was a technological marvel in its day (okay, not really), but now it just looks like the old Dodge Dart that’s been repaired a few too many times. As this article from a couple years ago says, it’s time to put the shuttle in the junkyard :
Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle’s main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.
Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle’s expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today’s dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.
In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problems–engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles–that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small “space plane” solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.
They’ve been promising lighter, cheaper “space planes” since I was a kid, yet I’ve never seen more than the occasional concept painting. After two major disasters and an unknowable number of hidden failures, the institutional blindness and lack of political motivation have destroyed the manned space program. There have been plenty of opportunities to invest in a more relaible means of transporting people into space, but if it hasn’t happened yet, I doubt it’ll ever happen in my lifetime.
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This was one of the reasons for the founding of the Mars Society and for the institution of the X Prize. Many of the Society’s members and the X Prize’s funders believe that the U.S. has squandered an historic opportunity by allowing the manned spaceflight program to degrade into a series of shuttle flights whose purpose seems to be solely to fly the shuttle.
Comment by Kenneth Fair — August 4, 2005 @ 7:33 am
While I agree that it’s long past time to replace the shuttle, I have to take issue with this phrase:
… the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.
Actually, “retro” videogaming is something of a fad these days – those old videogames, even ones using electronics more primitive than an 8086, are making a comeback.
Certainly, you’re not going to be able to run modern games like GFA, with their detailed, realistic graphics, on a 6502-based machine. But don’t be dissing those of us who still enjoy old Atari games! :-)
Comment by Mathwiz — August 4, 2005 @ 8:15 am
I agree that the shuttle fleet is far too complicated to ever be practical, and by now, far too old. The simpler the design, the fewer things there are to malfuncion.
In regards to electronics, however, in the high-radiation environment of space, you want dependable, robust chips that have stood the test of time. For example, while we were using Pentium IIIs a couple of years ago, the Hubble had it’s computer upgraded to something 10 times faster than it was launched with. The new processor: a 486!
We squander computing power here on Earth. It really doesn’t take much to compute orbital mechanics and whatnot, as long as you don’t insist on a fancy-schmancy real-time graphic display.
Yeah, the shuttle’s done.
Comment by Dave — August 4, 2005 @ 9:32 am
The flaw in all of this is, of course, that if we cancel the shuttle, we are essentially cancelling any US manned exploration of space. The shuttle, old, flawed, and costly as it is, is the ONLY vehicle in the US capable of carrying a person into orbit (albeit not much higher than that).
Despite Bush’s “Let’s look for WMD’s on the Moon” program, the fact is that if the shuttle is cancelled, there will be no willpower in Congress to develop a new manned orbiter/explorer. It’s too costly to start from scratch.
That leaves us with flying Russian Soyuz to space.. if you think OUR program is screwed up, check out theirs.
BTW, the article says that the Buran was too costly to fly, which was true. At the time the SSSR was developing Buran, the soviet union couldn’t afford to fly kites, let alone spacecraft. It’s a pretty unbalanced comparison, in my opinion.
Comment by FreedomByChoice — August 4, 2005 @ 9:56 am
anybody know how many people have been lost in how many soyuz launches?
It’s about time the Japanese and Europeans build their own manned space vessels.
I sort of agree with the NASA scientists who want to concentrate on robots and other unmanned space missions. One scientist put it this way – As soon as you put a person on a spacecraft, immediately your primary mission becomes keeping him/her alive. Whatever the scientific reason for the mission was, takes a back seat. Also, the cost of the mission multiplies 10 fold.
That means that for every 1 manned mission, you could fly 10 unmanned ones. And you can afford to lose a few without everyone freaking out.
OTOH – I do like the idea of humans on the last frontier – I just don’t think right now is a practical time for us here in the USA.
Comment by Dave — August 5, 2005 @ 9:11 am
What to do with the Shuttle
…
Trackback by The Idea Man — August 15, 2005 @ 12:20 pm
What to do with the Shuttle
As Greg has delicately and gracefully pointed out at The Talent Show (1,2), we have a space shuttle problem. In a nutshell, we are rolling through the stars in twenty year old wheels! I remember being embarrassed to drive my first car, an eighteen-yea…
Trackback by The Idea Man — August 15, 2005 @ 12:23 pm