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29 years. Wow. I sort of expected better space craft by now. Do the space shuttles continue to evolve had their been no accidents?
by pgrote 12y ago
29 years. Wow.
I sort of expected better space craft by now.
Do the space shuttles continue to evolve had their been no accidents?
- jccooper 12y agoThe system should have been evolving already by the time of the Challenger failure; by that time it was already clear that the system could not meet its goal of quick and/or cheap re-usability. But by that time NASA already had a full "fleet" and a space station to assemble, and had no taste (or money) for developing a new system--or even variations on the existing STS system. There were some design improvements over the years, but the system remained basically as first flown in 1981 until it was shut down, with no successor in mind. The STS was supposed to be a first generation system, to fly for 10-15 years before being replaced. By now we should be on a third-gen STS, having learned the lessons of the first few. Had that happened, they might have a pretty good system by now. But NASA got locked into a flawed 1st gen system by over-buying the first run out of over-confidence, by politics, inertia, etc. (Part of the problem was that the orbiters were designed for 100 flights, so NASA wanted to get something like that out of them. But the flight rate ended up so far below expectations that the darn things just wouldn't wear out.) I guess it's just as well; NASA doesn't really have the structure for cost-effectiveness. STS v3 might have been good enough to stifle the emergence of something like SpaceX, which has a much better shot, long-term, of really making spaceflight work.
- mikeash 12y agoSpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon 2 are better in a lot of ways. The Dragon 2 isn't quite flying yet nor has Falcon 9 demonstrated its reusable capabilities, but I think it's close enough to count now. It's not as capable in some ways (you probably couldn't do something like the Hubble servicing missions with one, and definitely couldn't bring satellites back to Earth) but substantially cheaper and should be much better in the reusability department. Falcon 9 should be about 90% reusable within the next few months (the first stage will be reused, the second stage will be thrown away, but the vast bulk of the rocket is in the first stage) and Dragon 2 should be reusable from the start. It should also be a lot safer since the entire Dragon 2 capsule can fly away from the rocket if it starts to explode. If a Challenger-like scenario happened there somehow, everyone would most likely survive, and you'd just need a new $50 million (roughly) rocket for the next shot. Progress has been slow, but it's still there.