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I loved this article. Teared up a few times thinking about how things could have gone differently. I had an opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center in Decembe

by geuis 13y ago

I loved this article. Teared up a few times thinking about how things could have gone differently. I had an opportunity to tour Kennedy Space Center in December. I think many people have this idea that the NASA of today is a shadow of itself and that it's stagnating. I had an opinion something like that. To my surprise, NASA is in the middle of some very interesting work. They've completed a new gantry/launch tower for their next generation of rockets which will be close to or bigger than the Saturn V. Several of the launch pads have been completely retrofitted. There's a lot of cool activity going on that we'll start seeing on the big stage in the next couple of years. It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service. But looking back, despite their majesty the shuttles took a lot of work to do relatively little. (Little in this context is still a huge amount.) It was time to retire them. I'm cautiously optimistic about NASA's future. The idea of being more of a support role for commercial manned space may seem beneath them, but it's not. They will continue doing the types of projects that are impossible for companies, including manned missions.

gus_massa 13y ago
> It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service. I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches. According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.
- sentenza 13y ago
  When visiting the Technikmuseum Speyer recently, I had the opportunity to see an actual Buran, the Russian Space Shuttle, on display. Today, it is easy to forget that the Russians percieved the Space Shuttle as a weapons platform. The tactical advantage of "coming out of space" to deliver a payload made them build their Space Shuttle clone. Buran never had any civilian purpose. After all, they were quite happy with Soyuz for all research purposes.
  - Crito 13y ago
    The Shuttle may not have been a weapons platform, but it was designed specifically with military missions in mind. It was given it's massive cross-range capability (those massive wings (and mass that goes with them)) so that it could return from polar orbit missions. There was an idea of going into polar orbits and literally snatching Russian spy satellites out of the sky and flying them back to the ground. No polar orbit missions were ever performed, however there were several classified DoD missions to orbits with lower inclinations.
    - erichurkman 13y ago
      And, as I recall, part of the agreements to fund the Space Shuttle to begin with came from the military and spy agencies: a better capability to launch and service spy satellites. When the Space Shuttle program began, they planned for hundreds of flights, around 50 per year. The shuttles were only designed to last 100 missions before retirement. We were supposed to get a new shuttle rotating into service every 4 or so years.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  If you add up all of the US launches then its numbers don't look so bad either. It's not quite apples-to-apples. The big problem with the shuttle was that it was a non-solution to arguably a non-problem, and having created this very expensive non-solution, a mission had to be found for it. And it also turned out to be horribly unsafe (aside from the people lost in the Apollo fire -- which was during a training exercise, all of the US casualties in space vehicles have been from the shuttle). E.g. one of the highest profile achievements of the shuttle program was repairing Hubble. But without the shuttle program Hubble would simply have been replaced (more cheaply). IIRC it turns out that the US air force had (and presumably still has) several superior telescopes sitting in warehouses in case they need to replace a spy satellite in a hurry. And of course the single biggest achievement of the shuttle program is the ISS which is an utter boondoggle.
chawco 13y ago
I toured Kennedy back in 2011 while STS-134 was sitting on the pad. I didn't quite have the impression that NASA of today was a shadow its former self, but I sure walked away from the tour thinking it was. Learning that the giant VAB sitting there was constructed for one purpose: Building a Saturn V. Learning that the crawler that moved the craft around were built for one purpose: Moving a Saturn V. Then moving on to the most interesting part of the tour, not the shuttle sitting out there on the pad, but a giant warehouse with a Saturn V on its side inside. Everything seemed to be in a slight state of decay -- not entirely neglected, but definitely from another age. The age of the Saturn V. The biggest impression I got from the whole experience was both awe inspiring, and sad: Apollo was NASA's zenith, and the future doesn't look quite as bright as those days in the 60's. I'm hopeful that I'm wrong, but every part of the experience reinforced in me the belief that NASA's glory days had come and gone.
- marshray 13y ago
  Yes, it's a bit sad and Apollo was an incredible set of engineering but let's keep something in mind: the massive budgets of the "space race" were fueled by Cold War tensions. A not-so-subtle implication of the space program was you'd better spend ridiculous levels of resources on rocket research or risk being dominated from above and by the way look how precisely we can land things back on earth. I'm not going to complain about the result, but neither do I miss all aspects of it.

by geuis 13y ago

gus_massa 13y ago

> It was heart breaking to see one of the shuttles hanging in the museum. They really are beautiful, utterly massive machines. You can only get a sense of loss looking at them, feeling that we're missing something big by having removed them from service. I think this is the main problem with the space shuttle. They look good in a museum. They look good in a postcard. They have a mix of cutting edge, unproven, easy to break technology. They are a dead trap and explode in 1/50 launches. According to Wikipedia the Soyuz have 4 dead astronauts, in 1700 launches. (No deads since 1971, and they change the model, so the new model perhaps is safer or perhaps they are lucky.) But they are "cheating", because most of the missions are unmanned. When they explode, usually nobody dies. The death rate is also approximately 1/50, But they only put humans when it's necessary.

sentenza 13y ago
When visiting the Technikmuseum Speyer recently, I had the opportunity to see an actual Buran, the Russian Space Shuttle, on display. Today, it is easy to forget that the Russians percieved the Space Shuttle as a weapons platform. The tactical advantage of "coming out of space" to deliver a payload made them build their Space Shuttle clone. Buran never had any civilian purpose. After all, they were quite happy with Soyuz for all research purposes.
- Crito 13y ago
  The Shuttle may not have been a weapons platform, but it was designed specifically with military missions in mind. It was given it's massive cross-range capability (those massive wings (and mass that goes with them)) so that it could return from polar orbit missions. There was an idea of going into polar orbits and literally snatching Russian spy satellites out of the sky and flying them back to the ground. No polar orbit missions were ever performed, however there were several classified DoD missions to orbits with lower inclinations.
  - erichurkman 13y ago
    And, as I recall, part of the agreements to fund the Space Shuttle to begin with came from the military and spy agencies: a better capability to launch and service spy satellites. When the Space Shuttle program began, they planned for hundreds of flights, around 50 per year. The shuttles were only designed to last 100 missions before retirement. We were supposed to get a new shuttle rotating into service every 4 or so years.
Tloewald 13y ago
If you add up all of the US launches then its numbers don't look so bad either. It's not quite apples-to-apples. The big problem with the shuttle was that it was a non-solution to arguably a non-problem, and having created this very expensive non-solution, a mission had to be found for it. And it also turned out to be horribly unsafe (aside from the people lost in the Apollo fire -- which was during a training exercise, all of the US casualties in space vehicles have been from the shuttle). E.g. one of the highest profile achievements of the shuttle program was repairing Hubble. But without the shuttle program Hubble would simply have been replaced (more cheaply). IIRC it turns out that the US air force had (and presumably still has) several superior telescopes sitting in warehouses in case they need to replace a spy satellite in a hurry. And of course the single biggest achievement of the shuttle program is the ISS which is an utter boondoggle.

chawco 13y ago

I toured Kennedy back in 2011 while STS-134 was sitting on the pad. I didn't quite have the impression that NASA of today was a shadow its former self, but I sure walked away from the tour thinking it was. Learning that the giant VAB sitting there was constructed for one purpose: Building a Saturn V. Learning that the crawler that moved the craft around were built for one purpose: Moving a Saturn V. Then moving on to the most interesting part of the tour, not the shuttle sitting out there on the pad, but a giant warehouse with a Saturn V on its side inside. Everything seemed to be in a slight state of decay -- not entirely neglected, but definitely from another age. The age of the Saturn V. The biggest impression I got from the whole experience was both awe inspiring, and sad: Apollo was NASA's zenith, and the future doesn't look quite as bright as those days in the 60's. I'm hopeful that I'm wrong, but every part of the experience reinforced in me the belief that NASA's glory days had come and gone.

marshray 13y ago
Yes, it's a bit sad and Apollo was an incredible set of engineering but let's keep something in mind: the massive budgets of the "space race" were fueled by Cold War tensions. A not-so-subtle implication of the space program was you'd better spend ridiculous levels of resources on rocket research or risk being dominated from above and by the way look how precisely we can land things back on earth. I'm not going to complain about the result, but neither do I miss all aspects of it.