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Comment by pookha | Hacker News Reader

As a kid I thought the shuttle was awesome. As an adult I'm horrified by it. Damn near every tile was custom and snowflake. Orbiter had to be stripped down to the frame every launch. Tanks required major refurbishing... Massive gaping black hole of endless funding that bled NASA dry for years. My suburban school system failed teaching anything whatsoever about the Saturn V. Everything in the 80's and 90's catered to the space truck, even after the tragedies and slow launch schedules. It did a great job at keeping kids interested in big-space after the cold war ended though.

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Joe Sutter aka "father of the 747" gave a talk at the UW School of Aeronautics and Astronautics after the Challenger disaster in 1986. [0] He was on the Rogers Commission with Feynman and others that investigated the root causes.

The thing that still sticks in my head was his description of the shuttle as an experimental vehicle, which he described as having 700 "critical" components. Critical in this case means that if that component fails you lose the vehicle. He stated that by contrast the 747 had zero critical parts.

It's still the best engineering talks I've ever heard.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Sutter

NASA sold it as safe and had put an estimate of 1 in 100 000 chance of a catastrophic failure.

Actual number 2 in 135.

Is this talk anywhere? Or maybe one sililar to it?

I've never found anything like it, unfortunately.

What counts as a component in this context? Obviously it couldn’t fly without a wing. (I would like to use this stat to comfort someone who doesn’t like flying)

But it fixed Hubble. Could that have been done any other way?

They could have made a new one and launched that instead. The Hubble cost, up through launch, was $6.6B in today's dollars. [1] Making a second one would have been expensive, but less than that since you can reuse the design, software, and much of the experience.

The shuttle program cost $269B in today's dollars [2] so you need a lot of other benefits, not just fixing the Hubble.

[1] "the Hubble cost-to-launch was $4.7 billion in FY 2010 dollars" https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/499224main_j...

[2] "The US Congress and NASA spent more than US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars) on the shuttle from 1971 to 2010" https://www.nature.com/articles/472038d

I would also believe that they could have done all of the Hubble servicing missions with a capsule-style vehicle. If they had involved loading it into the payload bay and bringing it back to Earth to service on the ground, sure. But they were all done onsite, and you can do spacewalks from a capsule, too. I admittedly don't know any of the details, but I'm guessing that there's not really anything about the Hubble servicing missions that's fundamentally more difficult to do without a space truck than assembling Mir and Tiangong were.

No, as someone else pointed out the repairs were done in the cargo bay of the shuttle over the course of 5 days. GP is right though - just building and launching a replacement would make more sense that spinning up a shuttle program to do the repairs.

A Soyuz with a booster - a Blok D - launched on Proton together would be much cheaper and likely much safer than a Shuttle launch. That would be enough to get to 540 km height orbit, bring two or three people there, bring spares, make an EVA (the orbital module of Soyuz was designed partially to be able to do EVAs), and come back. The Blok D would have a docking module so Soyuz would connect to it and use it to raise (and lower) the orbit as needed.

The repair mission couldn't have been done by Eva only. There was to much work and it would have taken forever and most of it couldn't have been done with their suits since it was very precise work.

They had to take it into the shuttle's cargo bay to do the repairs. They worked on it for 5 days and changed the faulty instruments and also changed the solar array and gyroscopes.

Correct me if I'm wrong but Soyuz just doesn't have the capacity to do that type of mission.

This is, of course, a stretch - requires to have a really good relationships between USA and Russia.

But technically, bringing Hubble to the Shuttle cargo bay doesn't change things much. Ok, the telescope isn't flying anywhere - but if you have a Soyuz nearby, you could also attach it to Hubble firmly enough, just as with Shuttle. And just as with Shuttle you can't avoid having to work with the instrument in spacesuits - since you can't bring Hubble into the pressurized environment where the spacesuits are not needed.

So, I don't know for sure how many technical details should be overcome for that mission to work - but in principle you at least can get to the Hubble with something different than the Shuttle. Today it could be the Crew Dragon, and 10 years ago it could be Soyuz.

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