Dismantling the Space Shuttle Program | Hacker News Reader

Dismantling the Space Shuttle Program

theatlantic.com

39 pointsadmp31 comments

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3po2gdQNgqk

I remember watching the episode of Top Gear where James May drives the new moon buggy, then sits down and talk about the old moon buggy.

[Kind of a spoiler] The old one, which served everyone so well, was left behind to collect dust on the surface of the moon for the rest of eternity. And then, he says, "But if you ask me, it's not half as sad a moon buggy that will never get up there at all." I tear up just thinking about it.

Thank you. That was amazing.

Can't help feeling a little sad. The same feeling when the Concorde was retired.

Its not sad that these awesome machines are being phased out. Machines/designs become old and obsolete all the time. But in this case, there is simply nothing better to replace it. It is as if this was as far as mankind could go and have to turn back.

Here's to hoping that some day there will something more ingenious that will be a worthy successor.

This one was obsolete well before its first flight. Astronauts could be delivered to LEO with expendables for less money. Satellites and supplies to the ISS could be delivered without risking human lives and, again, for less money. By using expendables you would end-up building modular spacecraft, iterating designs and improving them on every launch. By using less money you get to build more expendables.

The shuttle is a beautiful machine, but it's even less practical than the Concorde. And many, many orders of magnitude more expensive.

Sadly, a Saturn/Apollo stack would be more ingenious and a worthy successor.

That said, the SRBs, the tank and the engines could be put to good use. I guess the tank could be adapted to LOX/Jet-1 and engines and payload could be fitted on it.

The orbiter is the problem.

It breaks my heart that we didn't have a replacement lined up years ago. I fear it will take China landing on the moon until the US gets serious about funding NASA to do some hands on space exploration. Granted I'm happy that we live in an era when space science is booming, but getting humans off this rock more often shouldn't be that hard to do in the 21st Century...

NASA's budget has been pretty steady at about half its boom-time moon-landing 60's budget for several decades. http://jeffreyellis.org/images/NASA_budget_history_2.png That's $15 Billion a year - not a ton of money when the shuttle costs a billion per launch, but I'll bet it's plenty in the hands of a more efficient organization such as SpaceX, with costs 1/5 - 1/10th as much.

Exactly, and when there is a good commercial reason for going to the moon (or anywhere else).

I think there have been good commercial reasons for decades. The problem isn't inherent to the task, the problem has been legislative and regulatory uncertainty. The only way around that would be operating from a more open jurisdiction (difficult due to so many of your potential workers being banned from working with you due to ITAR) or having so much personal wealth that you can afford to take the risk, which is the path it seems to be happening on.

"I think there have been good commercial reasons for decades"

What commercial reason would you have for going to the moon at the moment?

Luna Park[1] isn't going to build itself. Seriously though - is there a market for exotic vacationing (orbit/lunar surface)?

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Series_Has_Landed

The moon is an excellent source of raw materials for orbital work: silicon, oxygen, aluminum, and potentially the rare earths also needed to turn these into communication satellites and solar power satellites. We're on the cusp of being able to do these things entirely through automation and occasional remote operation, but it would have likely been profitable to do it with on-site humans in the 80s if political fear hadn't gotten in the way.

If you just want people to go into space then why does it matter if it’s NASA or China National Space Administration?

I see a spinoff value with the technology: http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/

One of the great boondoggles of our history is finally wound down. The sentiment should not be nostalgia, but rage for all those wasted resources. Consider just the kind of unmanned probes that could have been sent out there.

Wait until you hear how much the military costs. Just consider the kind of foreign aid we could provide if we weren't shooting injured civilians from billion-dollar helicopters.

The point is, the amount of money the space shuttle wastes is nothing compared to what the rest of the government wastes. Things get funded because they appeal to people -- the space shuttle is the reason NASA gets funded at all. Sending people to space is cool.

Sending people to space is cool. But sending people AND stuff to space at the same time is simply a stupid waste of money. The Apollo program docked space ships launched from the moon. If the shuttle was designed for 8 people + air filters + some water and no cargo it could have added a lot more redundancy and with a better Mass to surface area ratio it could have returned to earth a lot cooler. They could have even added some air breathing engines and landed an airplane vs a falling brick.

We needed a 6-8 seat aircraft and built a 737.

Looking at this photo:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/infocus/shuttle041311/s_d0...

I can't help but picture a storied old workhorse complicity plodding to it's demise. Just think of the places this thing has been! It's somehow a sad picture.

It's going to be dismantled (killed), 'made safe' (sterilized), and put on public display (put up in stocks). Outta go out with a bit more glory.

It's appealing to romanticize and anthropomorphize machines, but you really shouldn't. They only exist to suit the whims and needs of people, and any romance or feelings between man and machine are strictly one-way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsQXQGaasUg

That picture is meaningful to me because of what it represents.

First, thanks for posting that video again- I love that ad.

Second, of course I know they aren't alive. But if I derive some enjoyment from it, isn't that suiting my whims?

It's just more fun when I can reprimand my motorcycle for trying to throw me. Maybe I need a horse, but I can't swing that.

(Third, I agree with scott_s)

Open source it! Not happening, I know, but wouldn't that be sweet?

Doing so would be in violation of ITAR among other laws:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

Leading humanity to the stars has been limited in the name of national interest.

I don't see the big deal about the link. Some private company's technology was stolen by the Chinese after that company blew up a bunch of Chinese citizens? If the technology was any good, the rocket would have gone up :)

Har, har. You're right, the link does not tell the whole story -- it's hard to summarize the situation easily. See my comment to the similar question below.

The designs for the Space Shuttle were publically available - the Russians started from them when building the Buran.

The CIA claims the Soviets were working from a rejected Shuttle design provided as part of an engineering misinformation campaign:

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

Are you sure? The space shuttle has classified secret communications tech on board?

According to your link Intelsat 708 had classified systems. I find it highly unlikely that the space shuttle has militarily sensitive secrets unless you're suggesting that the shuttle program itself was militarised?

The level of scrutiny to get an approval to release any meaningful part of the Shuttle flight software would be almost insuperable. "Open-sourcing it" is utterly out of the question.

However, this is not because there is secret communications tech on board.

It's because any "space-based technology" is covered by ITAR, and the US government has signaled (in the case I referenced, and others) that the gloves are off. It's not just fining the companies concerned, it's filing criminal charges against the involved individuals. This has been true for some years now, and the crystallizing event was the Intelsat incident above, which caused a multifaceted furor that resists summarization.

A case in point. I worked on a project to analyze ISS (space station) engineering data. We needed to look at the currents flowing through a motor on ISS that controls orientation of the solar panels. For publications released in the open literature, we were not allowed to label the axes on any of these motor currents. We were not allowed to have foreign nationals (such as, say, a Canadian grad student) working on the project.

The point being, any information about space-based systems is covered by ITAR, and the standard of scrutiny is very high.

I hesitate to say this but that sounds moronic.

What, in your opinion, are they trying to achieve with this sort of "scrutiny"?

Are they trying to stop Iran from developing a range of super-shuttles with lasers?

Presumably they're now going to pension off all NASA staff to avoid them sharing such expertise (like which way round to wire a motor) with outsiders?

I suppose they're trying to limit Chinese technological competition, and to delay Iran's getting long-range missiles (to choose two examples).

Legal solutions like ITAR are always coarse-grained, and the whole thing ends up looking silly because parts of it are silly.

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